I think this is the way. You can get to a kind of Facebook like experience. Seeing content from people you know. You do trade off many things like broad discovery, but what you get in return is a network that is extremely resilient to outside censorship and hard to spam, even without filters.

The reason that it should be done is that, even if it isn't very performant you do get something that is 100% aligned with the users.

From there you can add more robust nodes to people that better uptime / wider reach. That will have some centralizing effects, but if those fail then ordinary people still have a fallback that doesn't make them susceptible to all the problems of a wide open relay.