Don't trust, verify. This is tough advice because our time and energy are limited. Being able to discern where to put your time an energy is the crux of the matter.
I admit that I don't know much at all about lightning in spite of being a software developer by trade and a bitcoiner for quite some time. Oddly enough as a software dev, I am not a bottom-up thinker, more of a top-down thinker that looks for disconnects in reputable views and opinions and then tries to prioritize my time from there on what I perceive to be the most fruitful, low-hanging fruit.
Recently, I found an account on stacker.news that went hard against everything I have been trained to believe about the lightning ecosystem. This perplexed me deeply as he made a decent amount of sense talking about all of the VC money acting as a corrupting influence on lightning development. This guy was an infrastructure engineer and had very technical grounding in his views. I also sensed, he could possibly be too strong of a personality and maybe got rejected from VC money and is jaded as a result, etc. So now, amidst my massively overflowing plate of things I want to get done, I feel a strong need to deep dive into all of the lightning tech to build out a cohesive mental working view of the various tech. My gut tells me that the lightning network is going to be the next space for "shitcoinery". Big money, big ideas, but poor implementations getting over-marketed, etc.
There is a very visceral "builders culture" on nostr, and I think it's good but needs to be balanced and refined by embracing deep critique of solutions. Not just on a superficial low level code level, but on a high level purpose and architecture level. The projects that do this will attract my attention, usage, and potentially even my development time.
