if imeta didn’t exist the damus feed would be jittery. It’s very important for mobile clients.
Discussion
I don't doubt that it's there for a purpose, I just think it's not a good way to do it, for instance, how do you deal with posts that do not have that tag? expecting that tag for stability is not a good strategy. also, why does it need the r tag also? is that not redundant since there's already imeta?
1. Its a decentralized network, I can’t force other clients to add this metadata and damus gets poppy when its not there, i don’t see a way around this.
2. r tags are queryable, imeta is not indexed and is not meant for that. Damus adds r tags for every url it parses from a note when composing. I personally don’t know what people use it for but I did it because other clients were doing it.