The biggest problem is that the costs of running API nodes is so high. And normally, one API node is nearly not enough.
You can ask @themarkymark, who ran by far the fastest community RPC node. It was really expensive and got more expensive with time.
Now, I'm not argueing that this has to be fixed, but Steemit Inc. are doing exactly this - making it much cheaper to run API nodes and once that is done - the community will hopefuly stand up.
At least I know that I will work on something.
Thank you for the reply, just to be clear: API nodes serve data from blockchain to services? If there aren't any public ones, any service wishing to use Steem blockchain would need to run their own node?
I'm glad to hear Steemit Inc is taking steps towards minimizing these costs, as a long term investor in blockchains, I expect the ones I'm active within to be running for forever, or at least 100 years. Otherwise there's no point if the system can't handle that.
Should we require top 5-10 witnesses to run public api nodes and increase their pay if needed, after Steemit Inc has done their upkeep reductions?