Which form of custody is better? 

Fedimints vs one custodian? 

Asking because I’m debating internally, and comparing Mutiny with Wallet of Satoshi. 

In terms of UI WoS is better but I understand the trade off. How complicated is it to spin up a federation for a non-tech user to make the argument of “don’t trust a bunch of random people, trust ME and a bunch of others I trust” more palatable? 

Is it just better to encourage people to run their own lightning node? 

 Every option has trade offs you just have to pick the ones that best fit you.  wallet of satoshi is a single custodian in my opinion more risk of a rug than using federations 

 Mutiny also gives you the option once you have a big enough balance you can swap into your own lightning channels on mutiny 

 Yes I’ve seen it.

But I guess I wonder with all of these channel opening issues: will the barrier to open a channel always be this high? 

100k sats is not an inconsiderable amount. 

 Tradeoffs. You get way better privacy and censorship resistance with Fedimint. WoS is easier, although I'd argue Mutiny/Fedi are catching up. 

 I tend to agree. 

So far my only “gripe” with Mutiny (not even a gripe) is UI. 

Tbh, if the deployment is a fraction as fast as what happened with Nostr in 1.5 years this is extremely bullish to only have this gripe. 

 Indeed. WoS' days of being "the best lighting UX" are numbered.