I like this analogy. Relays can be your own little community, as open as you'd like them to be. You can run a public one or a private one. You could run one for all of your girl friends if you wanted. For example, I run several. wss://relay.nostrplebs.com for

Nostr Plebs | Get a Nostr Address (NIP-05)

Nostr Plebs is an easy way of getting a NIP-05 identifier/Nostr Address and other Nostr services, made by Bitcoiners, for Bitcoiners.

paying members. You have to sign up and use our service to use this relay. wss://nostrelites.org is a web of trust relay. Meaning it's a relay for everyone that I follow and the people that they follow to use. It prevents spam. It's fee. You can add it. The name is a meme. We're not elitists. And I have a private relay that I run at my house for all of my notes and events. It's kind of like a backup, but a private vault for all of my chats and DMs, etc. I can't be censored because I run my own relay. Your apps will connect to my relay to download my content. Primal's relay is a bit different. They aggregate content from all other relays and filter out certain content. They also offer a paid premium relay. We also have some great topic based relays or algo relays showing content from those topics or communities. We have a lot of other large public relays and smaller community relays. Some apps help with discovery here and some do not. https://nostr.watch is a nice tool to show most relays, but it doesn't tell you what they're used for. I guess thats kind of a know if you already know situation. We need better explores here 😩