I will only use this as a private server/relay as suggested if at all. If I ‘whitelist’ other people’s public keys:
Will these cross-pollinate over Clearnet relays somehow? Or is it like Matrix where I have TOR groups and Clearnet groups and posts on one don’t go to the others, ever.
Are whitelisted people only publishing through my instance or am I archiving their posts as well, like a relay?
If it’s a private relay over TOR do I have to close the clearnet connection and switch to TOR in order to store my posts on my server? (similar to question 1)
It seems like I should either have a public (clearnet) Nostr identity or a private Nostr community or face the pain of trying to do both by switching between TOR and clearnet a lot (perhaps even two key pairs). Sorry, I’m just dipping my toes into the Nostr world.
A relay can be public (anybody can write “notes” / “events” / posts to it)
A relay can be “private” (only authorized pubkeys can write notes to it)
A client can be configured to fetch the notes of interesting pubkeys from multiple relays.
If the relay is on .onion, the client will need tor capabilities in order to reach a .onion relay.
And that’s it. Super simple.
There is no “cross polination” of notes from one relay to another. If the pubkey that originated a note’s client is not configured to write to your relay, their note will not be published to your relay. For that, you need to subscribe to their content on one of the relays they publish to. Your client gets interesting notes from a relay that has it, or you don’t get the note. Probably by now there is special software run by some people where the relay publishes content that it finds on other relays using a client component, but this is a special configuration and custom setup on behalf of the node runner.
Hope that helps. Let me know if that leaves any of your questions unanswered.
*Note: I’m not an expert when it comes to nostr but this is my conception. If I got something wrong, someone please correct me!