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, plug-ins — all there when you need them, silent until then. See Getting started.

Make a community. Make one initiative in it, named after what you're doing. 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.

The part you run is, under the AGPL — the app, every tool in it, the mobile builds.

So are the plug-in SDK and the GitHub plug-in, under MIT, if you fancy building a plug-in of your own.

The pieces that exist only to run the hosted service are ours and stay closed. Nothing you self-host waits on them.

Yes — the marketplace has ready-made dashboards and plug-ins, 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 Plug-ins & the marketplace.

A few plug-ins 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 Plug-ins 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 a community admin to invite you, or whoever runs the server 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 whoever runs it. 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.

Five wrong passwords or codes within fifteen minutes will do that, whoever typed them. Password and code sign-in switch off for fifteen minutes, and your email addresses get a note saying so. A second time the same day it's an hour; after that, four hours each time.

Wait it out, or sign in with a passkey, which works the whole time. Or skip the wait: Forgot password on the sign-in screen emails you a link, and setting a new password from it turns sign-in straight back on.

Because you're joining a community that anyone signed in can find — from the directory, or through an invite into one. Those are open to people you've never met, and you need to be 16 or older to join one.

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

It's kept, encrypted, and used only to check age limits — a community's, or a plug-in's, which can differ by country. It's never shown back to anyone, you included, and it isn't sold or shared. Deleting your account deletes it.

Because the community it leads to is a listed one — anyone signed in can find it. The question follows the community, not the way in.

An invite to a community that hasn't listed itself never asks, and neither does anything else on Initiative.

Then nobody ever put the question to you: an admin added you, your workplace sign-in did, or the community listed itself after you joined. None of those had anyone at a keyboard to ask.

So it asks at the door instead, once. Everything else — your other communities, the rest of Initiative — stays open while you decide.

If you can't join communities you can see, it's almost always the age question. Two things look alike:

Either way, everything inside the communities you already belong to still works, and so does the rest of Initiative. What the question stands in front of is joining a listed community.

Extremely common, entirely fixable, and nobody is cross with you. Ask whoever runs 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 › Platform › 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 lands on the new project's default status. Set the one you want 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 that names people by email address won't match anyone, so export it from Initiative again. See Exporting a project.

Not on your own — your handle is how people find and mention you, so changing it is a job for whoever runs the server. What you can change any time is your display name, one per community — see Your name in a community.

A display name belongs to the community you set it in. Every other community shows your handle until you set one there too, with Set your display name at the top of its Members page.

Your timezone is wrong. It's almost always the timezone. Fix it in My Settings → Preferences and everything snaps back into place.

Tune them category by category in My Settings → Notifications — each has its own Bell, Email, Mobile and Desktop switch, and there's no minimum. Do not disturb, further down, has Quiet hours and Pause notifications. See Notifications.

On the community rail, open the community's menu and choose Leave community. Members and admins leave freely. If you're the community's only superadmin, you'll be made to hand the seat to somebody else first — you can't simply slip out and leave nobody holding the keys.

You can sign in, and you get one screen: that you're suspended, the reason the moderator gave if they gave one, and who to contact. Nothing else opens while it lasts — not your communities, not your own settings.

Nothing is taken away. Memberships, work, everything you wrote stays exactly where it is, and lifting the suspension hands the account back whole. The address on that screen is the one to write to.

It's suspended. Nobody in it can open it while that lasts, its admins included, which is why you're looking at a lock rather than the usual front page. Opening it says who to contact.

Nothing inside has been changed or deleted, and it all comes back as it was when the suspension is lifted. Members don't see the community at all in the meantime, so if people ask where it went, now you know.

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 files 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 file.

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.

Yes — start a conversation and keep adding people. Everyone is asked before anything reaches them, nobody can be added to it afterwards, and it's called by who's on it rather than having a name. See Talking to a few people at once.

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.

Use Report on it. It's on comments, notices, pictures, profiles and directory listings, and it goes to the right people by itself: anything a community holds reaches that community's moderators, and anything about an account reaches whoever runs the server.

Private messages are never moderated, so they carry no Report. To stop hearing from somebody there, ignore them under My Settings → Privacy → Ignored accounts.

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. Every tool you own exports from its Settings → Advanced: projects to a portable file, spreadsheets to CSV or Excel, calendars to .ics, and so on. 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.