Run your own LN node and connect to nodes that uses low fees. As I did in this experiment https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/lightning-routing-fees-experiment

I try to have 1st, 2nd, 3rd level of peers with lowest fees possible. In that way if I had a tx with 4 hops, at least 3 of them are low fees. If a node with high fees connect with me I simply close that channel.

The goal is to FUCK THE BANKS, not to fuck each others...

Shameless plug for my zero fee routing node https://amboss.space/c/iampigman

Once we have PTLCs and Eltoo the operating cost of running a routing node will go way down and subsequently the fees. Until then though HTLC attacks are too costly to facilitate altruistic routing.

Yes, I do worry.

Running routing nodes is pretty expensive because of the capital cost, risk, storage and maintenance costs, spam and force-closes fees.

Hosted channels fix this. Use https://sbw.app/.

LN is not necessarily meant to be "low fee". it is to provide an alternative settlement later with different speed propositions and trade offs regarding privacy and payment size.

Fees are a race to the bottom. They're currently can be pretty high but in the mean time you'll need to pick and choose what nodes you connect to.

Personally I'm currently using one of my LN nodes as a way to quickly move funds back and forth between Bitfinex and myself. I do this to minimize as much counter party risk as possible while still being able to take smaller long positions. To make sure I have liquidity I set my fees to Bitfinex at 1%. This disencourages others to use my liquidity but still lets them use it in emergency cases. And I get paid for it :)

Yes!

if you run your own node, and manage your channels yourself, you can setup advantageous channels, theres a zero fee routing node, i think i see him down in the comments.

Just gonna drop this here

I would not say worry, but i kinda feel this whole LN will be cheap forever is how people used to think the same thing about on-chain back in the day.

I think currently the growth and connectivity of lightning network is skewed to the side of early adopters joining, many of them trying to become profitable routing nodes and overall just experimenting with the space.

Fee structures will change when we get more organic growth with real world economies moving to lightning - think towns, communities, cities as that will naturally become more localized in terms of connectivity and network graph.

For example: if you have a bar and majority of people pay with lightning and you can pay your suppliers with lightning then it will make sense to be connected to either a local liquidity provider that primarily servers that community or directly to your counter party in that transaction

Lots of nodes currently try to gamify node status and be better positioned in the network as they don't have a "natural" economic position yet, but I think with more businesses coming on lightning and wider adoption among people this will change in the future.

I suspect we'll see long term network growth more in the direction of how internet works with isp, local internet exchanges routing metropolitan or country traffic and only sending the traffic further out if the destination is not local. In this scenario bigger routing nodes will become more of a backbone like we have tier 1 internet providers who take care of underlying connectivity between smaller participants (be it isps/cities/countries or in lightning network case clusters of nodes representing connected economies)

I think we will see more "centralization" in the sense that a bunch of competing big routing nodes will grow bigger and crowd out all other nodes. The fees between these hyper-nodes will be very low or 0.

What worries me more is the rising cost of opening and closing channels on-chain.

Use proper wallet and software which caps fees so you wont overspend on fees.

No