I think it would be more impotent to have a way for independent community members to run API nodes them self, then having a nice geo redundant deployment managed by one party.

What dose the API Server consists of? Is this just the API of steemd or is there another service involved and if so would it be possible to have the code available to play around with and try to build a independent setup connecting to a local steem-node?

Not to be ungrateful, my first reaction to this post was off course: awesome, finally a way to use steem independent of steemit.com like a real decentralized app. And it still locks to me a lot like that, only this small part seems missing, so thanks a lot for this awesome project!