Creating a new community - eviltoast

I’m new to Lemmy and decided to join this instance as /r/programming was one of the big reasons I joined reddit in the first place. Excited to be here, but I have a question on how do you create new communities? In some other instances I see that there is a button at the top called “Create communities” is it because my account isn’t fully validated yet? Do I need my email assigned first?