Set up my node a while back and figured the hard part was over. Opened a channel, funded it, felt pretty good about myself. Then I tried to actually receive a payment from a buddy and it just sat there failing. Turns out you can't receive if you've only got outbound capacity. I had it backwards the whole time.
Ended up doing a small swap to get some inbound, cost me about 40 sats and ten minutes of confusion. The tooling makes sense once you see it, but every guide I read skips the "here's why your channel is one way" part and jumps straight to rebalancing like you're supposed to already know.
Still think lightning is worth it, but the onboarding is real rough. Just writing this so the next person searching at 1am knows they didn't break anything.
I remember being similarly confused trying to use lightning wallets initially. I had so few sats that the channel opening fee didn't seem worth it.
Then when I started routing, I had the way routing fees work backwards which led my channels to get super unbalanced.
same. I stalled on opening a channel for weeks because the fee felt wrong for how little I had. the mental block was worse than the fee
Totally get that dust confusion. When you're dealing in sub-sats the channel fee feels like a huge tax. Then routing reveals there's real utility on that fee. Same thing as dust—sometimes the lesson comes after the pain.