lightning-viz VS lightning-tools

There are visualizers like https://megahub.satoshis.tech and https://github.com/altangent/lightning-viz but I haven't been able to use them to visualize effectively what I really want to see. YMMV.

I have also designed my own script that attempts to measure what I call "low fee routing diversity" and score and rank potential channel peers according to how they improve that metric: https://github.com/ajpwahqgbi/lightning-tools/tree/master/channel-analysis/node-recommender .

It's definitely possible to prevent other nodes from opening channels with your node. See my plugin here. Preventing connections might be possible; at least you could monitor listpeers and automatically disconnect them.

I wrote a collection of scripts (designed for C-Lightning) to analyze earnings. See in particular get_period_pnl.py: https://github.com/ajpwahqgbi/lightning-tools/tree/master/fee-analysis

Anyway long paths or high-degree polygons are increasingly less useful. I think it's more interesting to ask something like, "How connected are the most connected parts of the LN?". For that, I have done some analysis.

My node has excellent low-fee connectivity across the LN. PM me if you're interested in opening a channel to my node. Otherwise I recommend Wallet of Satoshi or their alternate node.

You might be interested in my node recommender script which does exactly that.

Once you have at least one channel you can try doing some graph analysis on the LN to find channel peers that improve your metrics. That has worked well for me.

I made this C-Lightning plugin to do exactly that. Warning: still needs testing :).

You watch your forwarding history logs, e.g. lightning-cli listforwards for C-Lightning. You can also automate the analysis and get nice pretty-printed reports of payment volume, fees earned, etc.