To answer your final question of how to figure it all out, I think the answer is to still give relays precedence over all. If you want to “follow” someone, you need to subscribe to their “home” server (whether that is their home server or the club that they treat as their home base (“he’s a regular”)).

The trick is to simply base it all on real life analogy. Notes are posters/flyers. The relay servers are like clubs/bars/telephone poles.

Notes *need* a sense of locality. It’s what makes it understandable for the average person. When the normie understands a system, they buy into and invest in the system. It can become “theirs”.