I heard about LightSats via Stacker News. The post title was #Buildinpublic: Bolt🔩Fun Week 6 - Lightsats ⚡️. I happen to have a few people in my life who I talk about Bitcoin to and they happen to put up with me for whatever reason. In particular, I have a co-worker who I've explained how Bitcoin works to. I also have a girlfriend I've gotten to use pouch.ph and phoenix, but its still a bit rough. She still does things like try to send LN payments to on-chain addresses and on-chain exchange withdraws to on-chain addresses (neither work thankfully). This is the feedback I've gotten so far.
Myself
So of course before I try something on someone else I'm going to check that I can understand it. I put up my sats clicked my own donation link and was met by a QR code to withdraw. This was actually a hurtle for me, but a hurtle that I had already overcame with Stacker News. I'm not used to LNURL-Withdraw requests. I'm used to the on-chain way of pasting the address in or scanning the QR code to send, but scanning a QR code to receive is still new to me. Through trial and error and thinking back to some specs I've read, I remembered LNURL-Withdraw was a thing and used the "Use LNURL link" button in phoenix.
Well a bit of a stumble for me, but I didn't use the recommended wallets. I wonder if the wallets that were recommended would have guided the user through all of that? So I started trying it on the people I know.
Co-worker
My co-worker didn't actually withdraw the sats. Didn't want to bother downloading an app. The entire rest of the experience they said was pretty nice. Thankfully, lightsats has that time limit so you can know for sure your donatee isn't interested (which you can manually set) and also tells you if your donatee has even opened the link. All very nice so far. Lots of resources for learning about Bitcoin as well and I thought that was nice too, but I needed to try it on someone who would download the app.
My Girlfriend
My precious girlfriend opened the link and I didn't really get any feedback on the extra stuff, but I did see when she opened the link. I had already taught her Pheonix and she said she couldn't do it because it was on another device but I asked her to just follow the process on the phone she had right at the moment. So she did, and without me answering any other questions (I hadn't used the wallets it suggested afterall so I didn't really have a direct way to answer questions like "what should I do?") I got a message back from her that read: "Boyfriend? Why I got the money when I scan the code?". Oh wow! It seems she got it on accident almost. This message was followed by "Whos money is that? Maybe its a scam." Which is funny, because of course its my money.
I know that users are going to use the first thing that is suggested. They have no point of reference for being picky. So I'm glad lightsats was recommending breez. (This is also the story of how I found out breez is a pretty nice wallet though currently in beta).