Frequently asked questions¶

No, and please don't go and learn any first. A project is a board. A task is a to-do on it. That is genuinely enough to run real work, and always has been.

Roles, tools, dashboards, apps — all there when you need them, silent until then. See Getting started.

Make a community. Open the Default Initiative it came with. Make one project. Put some tasks on it.

That's it. You now have a working setup and you are allowed to stop. Come back for the rest of this only when something actually feels missing, which for a lot of groups is never. See Your first community.

Self-hosting is free and always will be. It's open source, and it's the complete product rather than a trimmed-down teaser.

A paid hosted version is coming for people who'd rather not run a server, which is a completely reasonable thing to not want to do. See Self-host or let us host it.

Yes — the marketplace has ready-made dashboards and apps, and adding one takes a couple of clicks and no code. It holds what ships with Initiative plus whatever the person running your server has approved, so if something's missing, they're who to ask. See Apps & the marketplace.

A few apps need a program running alongside Initiative before they work. The GitHub integration is one, and it's open source — you can stand it up yourself, though it's a real deployment rather than a setting. Automations are ours and live only on the hosted service. See Apps that need something running behind them.

Most communities are private and don't appear anywhere at all until you're invited. You're not missing a search box — there's nothing to search.

Ask whoever mentioned it for an invite link. That link takes you straight there once you've made an account.

If your server runs a community directory, listed communities show up under Join a community on the rail. A community that hasn't listed itself won't be there however hard you look.

The directory is a server-wide feature that starts switched off, so plenty of servers don't have one. Everything there is invite-only.

Links can expire, run out of uses, or be switched off by an admin. None of this is a judgement on you as a person. Ask for a fresh one — it takes them about four seconds.

Some servers turn community creation off on purpose so people join through invites instead. Ask an admin to invite you, or to make one for you.

Give it a few minutes, then check spam. It is almost always spam.

If it still hasn't turned up, the server may not have email configured at all — ask your administrator. Reset links also go stale, so if yours has been sitting there since Tuesday, request another. See Signing in.

Changing your password signs out every device — that one's deliberate. If you didn't change it, use Forgot password on the sign-in screen. If your server uses single sign-on there may be no password to reset; sign in the way you normally do.

Because you're joining, or already in, a community that anyone signed in can find. Those are open to people you've never met, and you need to be 13 or older to take part.

You're asked once. The answer sticks to your account, so the second community asks nothing.

We work out whether you're old enough, then throw it away. Your account records that you answered — never the date. It isn't sold, shared, or stored anywhere.

Something put you in a listed community without you clicking Join: an admin added you, a single sign-on group sync did, an invite led into one, or a community you were already in listed itself. Any of those counts.

A community that hasn't listed itself never asks — not on an invite, not when you're added.

If you can't join communities you can see, and the parts of Initiative open to people outside your own communities are closed to you, it's almost always the age question. Two things look alike:

Either way, everything inside communities you were invited to still works.

Extremely common, entirely fixable, and nobody is cross with you. Ask an administrator of your server to reset the age question — anyone on the support tier or above can do it, and it's recorded in the audit log like every other action taken on somebody's account.

They can't see what you typed, incidentally, because it was never kept. Resetting simply lets you have another go.

Yes, by the platform owner under Settings › Admin › Community. Switching it off is the owner confirming that every account on the deployment belongs to someone 18 or older — which a company or school rollout knows and a public server doesn't. See Data & compliance.

Two likely reasons: you're in a different community (check the rail down the far-left edge), or it hasn't been shared with you. Fastest way to check is search — Cmd+K / Ctrl+K and type its name. See Search & shortcuts.

If you're not a member of the initiative it lives in, Initiative hides it completely — so a direct link says "not found" rather than "access denied". Ask to be added to the initiative. See Sharing & access.

It isn't meant to. My Tools and My Calendar — and the community front page — show what has reached you: shared with you, shared with a role you hold, or shared with everyone in an initiative you're in. It's a working list, not an inventory. Open a single initiative to see all of its work. See Your space.

Because navigation follows what you're in, not what you may reach — otherwise a community with a hundred initiatives buries the three you actually work in. Your authority hasn't changed: open any initiative and you see all of it. To keep one to hand, join it from the community front page (you walk straight in). See Community admins join like everyone else.

Yes, as many as you like. See Projects & tasks.

Expected. Projects can each have their own statuses, so a moved task restarts at Backlog. Set the new one and carry on.

Archive them. There's a one-click "Archive done tasks", and you can filter archived tasks back into view whenever you want. Nothing is lost.

It's fine. It's in the Trash — Community settings for shared things, your own Trash for your own items — and it sits there for a good while before going anywhere permanent.

Go and get it back, and then go and have a cup of tea. See Trash and retention.

Exports and imports identify people by handle (foobar#1234), because a handle is the same in every community and an email address isn't. A file exported before that was true names people by email and won't match. Export it again. See Exporting a project.

Not on your own — your handle is how people find and mention you, so changing it is an admin action. Your display name is yours to change any time under Profile & preferences.

Each community decides whether it shows real names or just handles. In a handles-only community your display name isn't rendered to anyone there.

Your timezone is wrong. It's almost always the timezone. Fix it in User settings → Interface and everything snaps back into place.

Tune them category by category in User settings → Notifications — each has its own email and mobile switch, and there's no minimum. The in-app bell keeps working regardless. See Notifications.

On the community rail, open the community's menu and choose Leave community. If you're the last admin, you'll be made to promote somebody else first — you can't simply slip out and leave nobody holding it.

A suspended account can still sign in and reach its own settings, which is how you find out why.

Every community is closed while it lasts, but nothing is taken away — memberships, work, everything you wrote all stay exactly where they are, and lifting the suspension restores the account whole. Ask an administrator of your server.

Deactivating is reversible — switched off, data kept. Deleting is permanent, and you choose whether your past contributions are anonymized or removed outright. See Closing your account.

No. Being in a community doesn't hand you its contents.

An initiative is only visible to the people added to it, and individual projects and documents narrow it down further still. The one exception is a community admin, who can see everything in their own community, because somebody has to be able to. See Sharing & access.

Put it in an initiative with only those people in it.

That's the strongest everyday boundary in the whole app, and it needs no configuration whatsoever — everybody else simply doesn't have it. To narrow further inside an initiative, share the specific project or document.

No. Each community's data is separated at the database level. See How your data is kept separate.

A community admin can see everything in their own community — that's part of running it. Platform staff on a hosted service get in only through temporary, recorded access that expires on its own. See Platform roles.

No. Messages are end-to-end encrypted, so they're readable on the devices in the conversation and nowhere else — not by an admin, not by whoever runs the server, not by us. They're also not community content, so they're not in exports or search. See Private messages.

Because there's no copy on the server for it to catch up from — that's what end-to-end encryption costs. Each device keeps its own history from the moment it joined a conversation, and signing out takes that device's copy with it. See Your messages live on your devices.

If you host Initiative yourself: wherever your server runs, and that's your call. If we host it: where our service runs. Either way it stays yours. See Data & compliance.

Yes. Projects export to a portable file, spreadsheets to CSV or Excel, calendars to .ics. See Getting your data out.

Back up, then docker compose pull and docker compose up -d. Migrations run themselves. See Backups & updates.

The database and the uploads, together and regularly — plus keep your SECRET_KEY somewhere safe so a restore can actually decrypt.

Yes — Initiative speaks OIDC, including mapping your provider's groups to communities and roles. See Single sign-on.