The first step is to be humble and recognize that your node/miner isn't helping anyone but yourself.

Run a full node for better privacy when you lookup your txns, and to enforce the rules of BTC on your own UTXOs.

Run a miner if you have cheap electricity and/or you value the ability to stack sats with noKYC passively and/or you can use the waste heat generated for other productive uses.

Run an LN node if you want to engineer your own liquidity to transact cheaply on LN.

The Network doesn't need your support. It works because people do things that make it decentralized for selfish reasons. If you aren't benefiting directly from joining the network, then its ok to "just be a user".

Read more first:

In other words, supporting the network is also:

If you cared about decentralization and willing to invest in hardware, at the very least you can run full node to increase the decentralization of Onchain validation process.

As long as you have a backup of your Onchain wallet WITH the correct derivation path, you can't really lose money doing so. The hardware invested can still be useful for other purposes.

Running mining node however required bigger investment not just buying the hardware you also need to get "cheap enough" electricity to power up those ASICs you bought. I don't even want to mention noise & heat management here. The worst that could happen is that your ASICs turns into just a heavy chunk of metal as soon as you turned it off (cause most of the times electricity cost outprice your mining reward). If you cared about Non-KYC aspect of it then just use Non-KYC Onramps instead.

In simple, there are 2 types of LN node : private node & routing/public node

There are huge gap of difficulty, investment + knowledge requirement running public/routing node over private node

Running mining node can be expensive due to electricity+hardware cost but your sats still safe if you have backup of your private key with the correct derivation path

But...... you can backup your wallet thousand times and still get force close running routing node. Several disaster scenarios such as hardware failure, internet down, outage or some of your peer fuck up their public node or some other reasons you can't control can burn your routing fee earned quickly. Just run private node + point it to your full node and that is the best set up i can recommend

I noticed that you do not specify the term "node" you used in this post, i assumed you still confused about various types of Bitcoin nodes ? Then this post i made should help you then