If anybody has any reading pointers on how fees work in lightning, what good settings are etc.
There are no good settings. If you open a channel between two large nodes then you will probably not route any payments unless you set your fees to zero. You have to experiment with your fee settings. I opened a large channel to Bitfinex and a small one to Nicehash. Even though my fees in that channel (Bitfinex) were high (1 sat base fee; 95 ppm), I routed quite a few payments. The largest one was ~950k satoshi and I earned ~91.5 sat in routing fees just for that single transaction. After some time I had to lower my fees since no one wanted to send their payment through that channel.
Are you familiar with the way the fees are calculated or do you need an explanation?
No, to be honest I do not seem to understand the fee system fully yet. I have a solid understanding of how the fees work on-chain but not in lightning. From what I've seen there is a base fee and a percentage of the amount to be sent?
Also, I would be interested what the settings of "urgent", "normal", "slow" etc. mean when setting up a new channel, I guess urgent translates to high fees, but I am not sure yet.
Honestly, I would not use RTL to open and close channels. I overpaid a few times because of it. Also, you can open multiple channels in a single transaction via a command line! This way you can save a ton on money on the transaction fees.
Good point, I guess that's because RTL sets the on-chain fee for the funding transaction high enough to get into the next block at anytime and by doing it manually you can use 1-2sat/byte and just wait some time.
Are people setting their fees on a per-channel basis or globally?
Most people set their fees on a per-channel basis. If you are running a small node then you will very likely change them often. There is a plugin which automatically adjusts the fees for each channel but I am not sure how well it works.
Oh plugins, that's one open construction site I still have
Didn't really work out yet, there are a few I would like to use, like the sqlite3 duplication and ev. autopilot but I can't get them to run yet. But I understand the general idea is not to care about the defaults, but fine-tune each channel so that it starts routing payments. What are some ballpark figures for like dirt-cheap but not free and what are some upper bounds before it becomes criminal price gouging (yeah I understand, the network just routes around expensive nodes, but you should get the idea what I try to ask for)?
By the way, are you interested in opening a dual-funded channel at some point? It is still an experimental feature but I have successfully opened this type of channel with two other bitcointalk members. Here's my node for reference. Also, you might find The Lightning Network FAQ useful. Most of the LN related discussion is held there.
I am all in, just need some time to get more experience in operation of my node before I waste your time. I will happily get back to you by PM in the next days. I still need to finalize the setup in terms of DR plan / backup / resilience. I'll still need some assistance in creating this via rpc interface.
Thanks for the advice to move my questions to here, which I did.
I should have posted my questions here in the first place as you suggested, I only wanted to let mocacinno know how much his walkthrough helped me.
