it has got me thinking about the idea of making a really raw, simplified version of nostr

like, imagine there is just events, created_at, with content, and a kind, no tags

tags could be subsumed into NIP-32 labels, so you can add them concurrently by clients instead of bundling them together with the event

make the encoding binary, so that all events are a uniform format, the data (content), then the hash of the data, then the signature on the data, everything in binary, no escaping, only a varint length prefix on variable length fields (ie content, everything else is fixed)

you could shrink down the signature field to 48 bytes because it's really unlikely that such a massive data set it's worth trying to mess around with forging signatures, events fly past a a million miles an hour, so a 1/4 reduction in signature security is probably not that big a deal because most of the time it is worth nothing, and this protocol doesn't certify monetary transactions, so it doesn't need to be as strong, and it needs low bandwidth more than it needs such high security as required for money

the real reason why json was used as the message encoding for nostr in the first place was the inventor was a python/django (probably) dev who was used to using this as a message format, as most web apps use json as a message format, as they natively decode it

and the reason why tags are in the event are because hashtags and to reduce the complexity of searching for hashtags for a twitter like experience

these are not necessary to the fundamentals