Thread

I don't think anybody is expecting to run Electrum 24/7? Shame it works like Phoenix with route finding delegated through trampoline routing. Given the compute available on desktop I would much rather have it do route finding locally like Zeus does. Would be a massive privacy win.

That's absolutelty possible. You just need to enable gossip ./run_electrum setconfig use_gossip True "This will allow you to open lightning channels to any other node instead of just the following hardcoded trampoline nodes." Source: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/swapserver.html

You can also disable trampoline in the GUI on desktop and Android, just uncheck "Use Trampoline" in the Settings. Gossip has the downside that it takes quite some time to sync and has ~100mb, so Trampoline is usually better UX if you just want to open the wallet and pay a invoice quickly.

Its perfectly fine to not keep it running 24/7, you can just use it as spending wallet and start it on demand from time to time.

But then only have unannounced = unroutable channels, righr?? Else peers will likely force close

By default Electrum only opens unannounced channels. If peers will force close depends on the goal/preferences of the peer I guess, but the hardecoded nodes that get shown in the Electrum GUI if you have Trampoline enabled are unlikely to force close even if you are offline for a longer time. If you open channels with some random nodes the risk is probably higher that they will force close if you lock up a lot of their liquidity for longer time. Btw, you also don't need to create additional channel backups in Electrum as it's possible to request a force close from the peer just with the seed backup.