Hey thank you for the feedback.
usernames expire after two years, so that could be it depending on when in 2017 you registered your username.
"One of my main questions with a lot of blockstack apps is exactly that - while they prove that something can be done, it's unclear to me how the next person who is going to google for "new blog" and try to pick one of squarespace, medium, or blogger - will use debutapp."
I think apps built with Blockstack like graphite and others: https://www.graphitedocs.com/ are gaining alot of popularity on the "normal" internet and getting recognition in places like producthunt, hackernoon etc: https://hackernoon.com/is-dweb-taking-off-a-glimpse-into-blo... , https://www.producthunt.com/posts/graphite etc etc
For now we are trying to point people to https://app.co/ to show the entire dapp ecosystem, not just blockstack based applications, but you can filter by protocol.
The next browser release will have blockstack apps from app.co dynamically loaded into the browser landing page as we know its a bit outdated based on the apps available now.
but yes there is alot more we can do, and alot of general awareness people can have on the internet. The idea is that applications like
blockusign: https://blockusign.co/signup.html
afari: https://www.afari.io/
graphite: https://www.graphitedocs.com/
sigle: https://www.sigle.io/
stealthy: https://www.stealthy.im/
travelstack: https://www.travelstack.club/
xor: https://xordrive.io/
diffuse: https://diffuse.sh/
dpages: https://dpage.io/editor/
(secret fave: https://blkbreakout.herokuapp.com/)
blockvault: https://blockvault.site/
and others listed on app.co, are also searchable on the mainstream internet, and advertised not as exclusively apart of the "new internet" but advertised based on the user value they provide that many centralised apps do as well.
"I'm curious about the host-able node comment. Who is this one click deploy targeted at? and what is the incentive for folks to do it today?" Making gaia hubs easy for users to host supports the idea that if they want to its not hosted by someone else/ a big cloud provider/another company etc, despite the api supporting they decide who has write access to their data/can delete if they want to, etc. It also allows them to host on their own server, or another cloud if they want to.
The incentive is mostly there in that already some applications are hosting gaia hubs for users and charging them for it, so there is an opportunity to make money.
In the future, we see companies dedicated to hosting gaia hubs for users and charging for it, not just applications, and you can see there are many parallel companies doing the same with IPFS type protocols like filecoin, golem computing for example (now lead by the previous founder of QubesOs, which says alot that she would leave her own operating system after a decade to focus on something like this). There is definitely money to be made in this space, I'm just a big believer in despite all of this, still making it easy for users to host their own on their own machine, a rasberry pi or something like Digital Ocean's one click deploy marketplace if they so choose to be wholly consistent with the idea that users can own their own data, manage the gaia hub themselves but not have to be an "anarchist sysadmin" skill level to do so. The incentive there right now is that Digital Ocean is also paying for 5months of one click deploy marketplace droplet hosting ($5/mo). That's something we are working on, but yes, there is definitely an economic incentive here..
The blockstack explorer actually went through some internal infrastuctural changes just this week. We are aware this is an issue and working on it. Will get back to you when you can expect faster response times for this. I would say end of not this coming week but next week, but will get back to your with more detail.