Personal
Allowlist your pubkey and a few friends. Strongest archive for your own notes. Useless as a general firehose — which is fine.
Choose a shape first
Not every relay should be public.
Start restrictive. Loosen later. It is much easier to open a relay than to scrub a spam epidemic out of the event store.
Community
Blocklist plus web-of-trust from a seed set. Accept people within N hops of operators; reject the rest at ingest.
Paid public
Advertise fees in NIP-11. Lightning invoice, record paid pubkeys, keep the lights on without running a commons.
Specialized
Kind-limited, language-filtered, group (NIP-29), or media (Blossom / NIP-96) relays. Niche is a policy, not a failure.
