i used to think this, but inefficiency is par for the course with websites in general. simple JSON makes it much easier to build for
Discussion
Right. The ease of development makes up for a lot. Nostr dosnt seem optimized at all... But its damn easy to build on top of.
Plebs are building us out of a fiat mess
Long term I think an 'upgrade to protobuf' flag and seperate entrypoints for persistent streaming connections can allow for both worlds.
Check out https://buf.build/.
Strongly-typed clients eliminate all the room for error. The client becomes the documentation and all that defensive coding goes away. Not to mention increased performance and reduced load.
The hard part with proto is generating clients and distributing them.
There are teams out there making sense of that part: https://buf.build/solutions/adopt-protobuf-on-web-and-mobile