Always have time for a question!

It’s true that the protocol is designed to function without any relay to relay communication, and it does, but of course it’s not the only option.

Anyone can make event requests to any relay that accepts connections. You could write a simple script that connected to a relay, asked for events, and stored them in a file. Then you could continually import that file to your relay.

As mentioned, we do indeed use Strfry (a nostr relay implementation written in C++) which allows us to simplify the above process of streaming events from other relays.