Happy to see one of our Keybase API responses used as the example here. I can share our intentions with that API call in the long run, and how it'll end up smaller, which is especially important for mobile devices.

The dictionary describing the user you requested comes back with some high level sub-dictionaries in it: "profile", "basics", "public keys", "pictures", etc., and the API replies, currently, with all the data to which you're entitled. This is quite huge as Tim mentioned in his post.

Server-side we have a module for loading user information, which allows you to request which of these fields you want when loading a "user object". For example, on a certain page of the site we might load a dozen users but only need [user.BASICS, user.PICTURES], so that's the only data that will be loaded.

The API simply doesn't expose this filtering mechanism, yet, as calls the API hit [user.ALL] which is a combo of everything available about a user. So, in essence, all we need to do to trim these down is allow you to pass a filtering parameter.

Btw, going in the other direction, there'll be a way to query for multiple users at once, fattening things back up :-). So for example you could request just basics + pictures for an array of usernames or userids.