“X viewed your profile” is an incredibly creepy pattern, especially when you can’t turn it off. Engineers and people building apps have accepted surveillance and abandoned privacy so thoughtlessly. They don’t even consider the negative implications of their actions.

“Wow thanks to all our insanely intrusive in-app spying mechanisms we noticed this drives engagement, let’s do more of that” 🤦‍♂️

Imagine walking into a store and there are 50 different cameras pointed at you from all possible directions monitoring your every move, used to collect data on what sells more products based on every action you make. People would be freaked out.

This is effectly what most apps do today, except the cameras are invisible. This would likely be illegal in meatspace, but few think about it when on their phone. Why would they? They hide it from you. Fuck in-app analytics.

This thing is pretty badass ✨

I wish this was an easy question to answer, but lightning is still young enough where it isn't.

the answer is maybe*.

Lightning network supports routing, similar to how the internet works you send a payment and your lightning node will try and find an optimal path to get from you to the recipient of the money.

If there is a path, for example:

you -> third party -> recipient

the money will take that path, and the third party can ask for a fee to route the payment through.

There can be multiple third parties:

e.g.: you -> third part 1 -> third party 2 -> third party 3 -> recipient.

If there is a path, generally, you can send a payment without having to worry about opening a channel (which is great, for example for things like nostr zaps), but if there isn't you're out of luck and you have to open a channel to either the recipient himself or a big node that both you and the recipient have a channel with, so that it acts as a relay.

There is one more occasion in which the payment will not go through if you're directly connected to the recipient and that's if you the fees charged by the third parties along the way are higher than your wallet's configured limits.

Does that make sense?

I wish this was an easy question to answer, but lightning is still young enough where it isn't.

the answer is maybe*.

Lightning network supports routing, similar to how the internet works you send a payment and your lightning node will try and find an optimal path to get from you to the recipient of the money.

If there is a path, for example:

you -> third party -> recipient

the money will take that path, and the third party can ask for a fee to route the payment through.

There can be multiple third parties:

e.g.: you -> third part 1 -> third party 2 -> third party 3 -> recipient.

If there is a path, generally, you can send a payment without having to worry about opening a channel (which is great, for example for things like nostr zaps), but if there isn't you're out of luck and you have to open a channel to either the recipient himself or a big node that both you and the recipient have a channel with, so that it acts as a relay.

There is one more occasion in which the payment will not go through if you're directly connected to the recipient and that's if you the fees charged by the third parties along the way are higher than your wallet's configured limits.

Does that make sense?

receiving for the first time requires opening up a channel. this is a ONE TIME payment, after which it'll be exponentially cheaper

This man approaches you at a party and starts talking about decentralized social media protocols, wyd?

Hello, just joined today. Looks so much more open and has much more future potential than any of the other platforms. Hopefully it doesn't get to the point where people report stuff just because you don't like what they said. Not allowing for the bad things though.

If your name is Dan I will follow you.

Please repost to get the word out to all the Dans out there. Thank you.