As someone wary of the previous wave of “crypto hype”, but still interested in the core underlying technology, I recently decided to dive deeper into the Lightning Network.
Setting up and managing a lightning node (and to own a wallet capable of receiving lightning payments) seemed like a daunting task at first, but then I discovered AlbyHub.
It has a user-friendly interface, and a clean dashboard, with suggested steps to follow.
The actual business of managing a lightning node can be complicated, but AlbyHub automates most of this, such as channel management,
I found the developers extremely responsive on their Discord. There were a few bugs in the self-hosted version that I was using, and these were very quickly resolved.
You can elect to go for the full managed experience via their cloud offering, or run their open-source version. I do the latter, on a VPS, but you can naturally pick either way.
The hub links to your Alby account, which gives you a way to view and manage your balance separately and connect to other networks like Nostr (which, incidentally, is how I came across this!)
This is intended more for beginners or casual/curious folk, which is why I’m not mentioning Umbrel or Start9 here; if you value running this on hardware you own, you’re free to go that route, and I won’t get into any “which is better” discussion here.
Similarly, if all you want to do is receive Lightning payments and don’t care about owning the wallet for it, there are lots of other options (e.g. the “wallet of satoshi” app on iOS)
All round, AlbyHub works, and you if you wanted to dip your toes into operating a Lightning node, this is a good way to do it.
P.S. you also get an “address” to receive payments at if you do this, e.g. you can “send me sats” at agam@getalby.com
Originally published at http://abacusnoir.com on September 12, 2024.
