Checking in after my post about taking the plunge the other day. Spun up my validator and deposited. Took me, in total, about 10 hours (yes, really). I'm "Pending" on beaconcha.in.
I wrote down a lot of what I felt and did while trying to get it all together. I'm still kind of shell-shocked by the whole experience and I'm sure I'll talk a lot more about it later. What I'll say for now is that even the "for dummies" version of setting up a validator is significantly more intimidating and intense than most people think it is.
I'm proud of myself for (hopefully) successfully doing it, but even doing it on easy mode (dappnode) had a lot of issues, things that I didn't fully understand, or things that almost had me giving up (I gave up about 3 times and then went right back to it after 5 minutes of having given up).
To be absolutely clear, that's no one's fault but mine. I'm absolutely tech illiterate, but, sadly, I'm actually probably more tech-y than most people. So I do think we have a long way to go before this sort of thing becomes something non-tech can just pick up and do. Things that I think most here take for granted are very scary or even indecipherable to someone like me.
That actually brings me to something that this whole reddit fiasco has me thinking about. One of the great strengths of crypto and eth in particular is the layer 0 stuff. It leads to great communities like this or Ethstaker. We have Reddits and Discords which are filled with people willing and eager to help. The problem is that it seems like it may have led to less focus on delivering a user-manual that makes sense to a new user who has no idea what they're doing. Communities are great for fixing problems, but it seems like we rely on a nebulous social network to teach the basics. Even the best guides I found seemed to assume a lot of knowledge and I generally had 3-5 "1 stop shop" guides open at once as I did this.
The good thing with how tough it was was that, if everything works out and I start validating in a month and a half (thanks Celsius), I'll really feel like I earned it.
austonst