It's possible to use a tiny homeminer directly with Ocean, but you have to run your own Datum server (maybe this is not a must), and you have to run your own Bolt12-capable lightning node for LN payouts. Not impossible, but quite a friction, definitely not for a causual Bitaxe user. Zappool solves this, with Nostr integration: you just enter your npub as miner ID (and zappool pool server), and starting the next day, you get daily payouts as zaps to your Nostr account. Zappool is a proxy pool to Ocean, and doesn't take a cut (on top of Ocean's fee).