CoalesceFinding Members via Discovery
Forming a cluster with people you don't already have addresses for.
bootstrap -peers ... requires knowing every member's address up front. When you don't, and
need to find strangers to form a cluster with, use discovery instead:
coalesce-node bootstrap -discover -want 4 -room my-roomHow it works
Discovery publishes small signed ads to public Nostr relays and finds other nodes advertising into the same room. Each connection is still authenticated via a signed challenge-response, so you know you're talking to whoever holds a given keypair, but that's a different guarantee than knowing their real-world identity.
What discovery does and doesn't prove
bootstrap -discover proves you're connecting to whoever holds a given keypair, not that
they're a specific real-world person. That's the inherent limit of meeting any stranger over a
network, not a lesser guarantee unique to this feature.
What gets published
The signed ads are small and public: address, pubkey, and cluster size. Nothing sensitive is in them, but they are visible to anyone watching those Nostr relays.
When to use identity + assemble instead
If you'd rather inspect every identity bundle yourself before joining a cluster, or you're
air-gapped, use identity to generate your own key locally and assemble to build the cluster
from bundles you've exchanged manually. Same no-shared-private-keys property, more manual steps.