For the coding inclined you could consider Mapbox's Geobuf format. It's basically a binary representation of GeoJSON/TopoJSON data (protocol buffers for those who want the technical details).
There's a Python version here. I haven't found a good, open source, Python library to generate TopoJSON from geometries yet (at least for server side work). But you can use QGIS or PostGIS to create topogolies.
The format's main shortcoming is that no desktop app will open it directly (but that's to be expected from something brand new and not yet stable). You would need to write your own JavaScript/Python code to decompress the data and then create the geometry objects. So, for example, you could write some Python code in QGIS and open it there.