Paid relays are themselves the filter as spammers will not pay to write there. Relays do not do any censoring or filtering yet.

So by limiting your global and group chat to paid nodes, you will only read from folks using those paid nodes. But you will still be able to write everywhere (your paid nodes and public).

By using multiple paid nodes you increase your coverage for global feed.

Alternatively, nostrgram's following+ which shows you from your followers and their followers. Quite neat!

Your home feed and DMs read from both public and paid. So no problem communicating with your followers.