That’s not how any of this works! Jokes aside, @AugurProject is probably the only, with exception of @ethereum, @lightning, and bitcoin itself project in the space where the developers don’t actually operate or host it. It’s all community driven
So Augur’s not comparable to a startup, it’s a protocol. To interface *with* that protocol you need an ethereum node. Gethnode was a free ethereum node ran by someone in the community. Besides that, you have infura which appears to require api keys now
If you want to diy you can run a full node (which itself takes forever to sync) or a light node (which is extremely slow when fetching old data from ethereum, so much so it essentially doesn’t work for historical data, but does for new incoming data)
In the latest release of Augur App, Alchemy is providing an ethereum node endpoint for people to use which should be decently fast and could replace gethnode and light nodes as a default
The “web version” too is hosted by someone in the community who hosts it on ipfs alongside a backing augur node, it doesn’t appear they’ve updated their endpoints to use Alchemy instead of Gethnode
Since Augur is one of the only things on Ethereum that actually aims to be 100% decentralized, you’re getting the real, raw, albeit subpar experience
To make it better requires solving lots of problems surrounding Ethereum light node slowness, bootstrapping new augur nodes using something like webtorrent, making augur node itself more efficient, progressively loading data, etc.
It’s pretty clearly not equivalent to just some startup that should spin up some more servers and fix a couple things that take 5 min to fix, but rather real technical issues have to be solved so this stays up and is robust w/o relying upon altruistic hosters for speed
