Modify The Welcome Text In GNU Social

March 25, 2022 · 2 min read

Website's owner

Besides having some external accounts on federated social networks such as Mastodon, I am also running my own instances on a VPS sever for my digital company.

One of these instances is dedicated to GNU Social, a social communication software for public and private communications. GNU Social is an old, but robust platform that supports the protocols OStatus and ActivityPub.

Fediverse - Federated Social Networks
Picture by Eukombos on Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

GNU Social comes with some default stable themes. However, the look and feel of those themes is very 90's to me. If you want to give your GNU Social instance a brand-new look, you can use something more exciting such as Qvitter.

I am very happy with Qvitter and its intuitive design. Nevertheless, I wanted to customize the initial welcome text that appears on the main page:

We are a federation of microbloggers who care about social justice and solidarity and want to quit the centralised capitalist services.

Initial Welcome Text on GNU Social's Main Page

To modify the text indicated above, go to your site root directory, then navigate to the folder locale under the following path:

$ cd plugins/Qvitter/locale

Once in the locale folder, open the file en.json with your preferred text editor. In this case, I am using nano:

$ sudo nano en.json

Look for the line that starts with welcomeText, or use the shortcut Ctrl-W in your terminal to search for the text if you are using nano.

Replace with the text you would like to see on your welcome screen, then save and close your file. 😎 The result should look like this:

New Welcome Text on GNU Social's Main Page

If you want to learn more about the fediverse, you can also read my other blog article on the topic: Random Thoughts About the Federation/Fediverse.