100% agreed, thanks for flagging me here! The long-term intention was definitely that actors outside of Indexers could participate in Graphcast. This sounds like an excellent first use case to make that step.
I do think this is something that can be integrated into the Studio. It would require that a user signs a message (indicating subgraph identifier and, new deployment hash and other metadata) with their publisher wallet which is then gossiped to Indexers. Each Indexer would then verify the message signature is valid for the publisher, and that they care about the upgrade (i.e. likely that they are already indexing the current deployment hash), and could then automate off-chain indexing of the new deployment.
I could even see Indexers gossiping indexing progress back to publishers (slightly more challenging because state is involved), so publishers could see how many of already allocated indexers have fully synced the new deployment before they switching GNS and the rewards over.
@DataNexus if you were open to it and have the capacity to develop this, we’d love to work closely with you to deliver a Graphcast Radio implementation. We’re currently rewriting the SDK in Rust after some very promising testing, and expect to have that ready for use by end of January.