What are public channels for?

[bitdude]

open_channel command has --public argument that makes the channel being announced, but I can't find much documentation about it. Historical documents mention Electrum only create private channels and this argument is not even mentioned.

Can Electrum route through publicly announced channels? If not, what's the use case?

[bitdude]

So you are basically saying people can route through Electrum opened public channels, interesting, that's the first time I've seen that. All resources I've found mentioned Electrum can't route other people payments through.

[nc50lc]

All resources I've found mentioned Electrum can't route other people payments through.

That figures, because it's never been announced nor mentioned in their release notes either.
It's silently committed since the experimental version of v4.5.x. (around 2 years ago)
Ref: /spesmilo/electrum/commit/98a4d7b60d2102e81e8dddeccc9a4a67533a8e22

Most probably, it's currently not meant for end-users since it's not exposed in the GUI and it's set to "false" by default.
The reason why most articles and documentation mention that default behavior, aside from posts/docs being older than that commit.

[bitdude]

One possibly related question to this - is remote LN node able to create channel to my Electrum? Can I somehow construct the connection string for my Electrum, perhaps via Tor hidden service?

[nc50lc]

One possibly related question to this - is remote LN node able to create channel to my Electrum? Can I somehow construct the connection string for my Electrum, perhaps via Tor hidden service?

I haven't tested this myself but one developer noted that it's possible by disabling "Recoverable Channel" option in your settings.

Here's a link to the issue containing his reply if you want to read more because it seems like there's more to it.
Link: /spesmilo/electrum/issues/10270#issuecomment-3425324719

[bitdude]

Thanks, interesting. Probably easier to just run full LN node in front of Electrum as this looks highly experimental.