Crandoro is a social network for local and global news. The feed is chronological, with a bounded engagement bonus, and the service is designed to send readers back to the original sources.
How the feed is ranked
Ranking starts from the publication date. Engagement only adds a head start, itself expressed in time and deliberately capped: a heavily discussed post can never stay ahead indefinitely, it always drifts back down.
That bonus accounts for replies, Broadcasts, reactions and views, weighted by the account's audience. Reports push it down, and they weigh considerably more than a positive reaction.
This applies to the public feed and to your personalised feed alike. In the latter, a post broadcast by an account you follow starts again from the date of that Broadcast: this is how older content can resurface in your feed.
Above all, this score is a property of the post itself: it is the same for everyone. There is no personalisation, no profiling of your interests, and therefore no filter bubble built from your behaviour.
Giving traffic back to those who produce the news
Unlike platforms designed to keep users inside for as long as possible, Crandoro encourages outbound clicks to original sources, so that traffic returns to the journalists, media outlets, bloggers, institutions and non-profits who create the content.
This requirement only binds content produced by the service itself: the summaries written by our automated agents and the posts generated from a declared RSS feed, both described below.
Your own posts, on the other hand, are subject to no such constraint. You write what you want, with or without a link, under no obligation to cite anything: the only limits are the law and the rules of conduct set out in the terms of service.
A lean service, by engineering choice
The system is built to be resource-efficient. This is not nostalgia: it is a pursuit of efficiency, cost control and independence. A service that is cheap to run is a service that can stay free to make its own choices, without depending on advertising growth at any cost.
Up to three accounts, one set of credentials
You can run up to three separate public accounts (for example “Work”, “Sports” and “Personal”), using the same sign-in credentials. You switch between them without logging out.
Every action is carried by the active account: posting, replying and reacting always happen in its name, which keeps your audiences and interests separate.
Ghost mode follows directly from that principle: you stay signed in, but with no active account. You then browse the network read-only, unable to post, reply or react, since there is nobody to do it on behalf of.
Posting
- Posts: text, links and images, with optional location, rounded to the kilometre on your own device before being sent.
- Broadcast: re-publish a post to your own feed, the equivalent of a repost.
- Replies and likes: conversations happen directly under each post.
- Webpoints: every cited source gets its own page, at two levels. The domain level gathers everything on Crandoro that links to a given website; the URL level isolates the posts citing one specific article. Each page shows a preview of the source alongside the related posts. The conversation therefore stays attached to the source itself, long after the article has left the feed.
Discovering
- Public feed: everything being posted right now, from any account, filterable by language, category, tag, country, mentioned person and keyword. Your filters are remembered from one visit to the next: you find your selection again without setting it up.
- Personalised feed: only the accounts you follow. “Personalised” here refers to the selection, which you make yourself, not to the ranking, which stays the same for everyone.
- Local feed: posts around you, if you allow location access. Here too, your position is rounded to the kilometre before being sent.
- Search and keyword pages: to find a topic and follow how it evolves.
For creators and media outlets
- Domain verification: prove that you control your website, either with a file at its root or with a meta tag.
- Connect your RSS feeds: you can declare several feeds under your account's name. Each one must cover a domain you have proved you own or manage. The system then creates one post per feed item, carrying the link provided by the feed itself.
- Traceability: your account page publicly lists its relayed feeds, and every post generated this way carries a badge showing which feed it came from, leading to that feed's dedicated page. Any reader can therefore check where what they read comes from.
- Account RSS feed: every public account exposes its own feed, automatically detected by feed readers.
- API: application keys allow clean automation of posting, within anti-spam quotas.
Automatically generated news summaries
Automated agents operated by Crandoro publish short news summaries. Their scope is deliberately narrow:
- They only read public RSS feeds. No content that its publisher has not deliberately made available through a public feed is ever crawled.
- That sweep is used to spot recurring topics. A factual summary is then written and translated into several languages.
- Each summary is published with at most three links to sources. When a topic is covered by dozens of websites, this is therefore not an exhaustive list but a few representative references.
These summaries are provided for information only and may contain errors: the cited sources remain the authoritative reference.
Keeping track of what concerns you
Notifications tell you what affects your posts, and the interactions page gathers the replies, Broadcasts and reactions you receive. Public exchanges happen directly under each post.
Moderation and safety
Hate speech, harassment, spam and manifestly illegal content are prohibited. A reporting tool covering twelve incident categories is available on every post, and you can hide or block an account at any time. Sanctions are graduated, from a warning to the suspension of an account, up to a full ban. Details are in our terms of service and in our child safety standards.
Where your data lives
Crandoro is hosted in France, at OVH Cloud, and its processors are located in the European Union, apart from a few technical transfers detailed in the privacy policy. We apply data minimisation and do not sell your data. Audience measurement and advertising services, when active, only run after you consent.
How the service is funded
Access to Crandoro is free. There is currently no advertising on the service. In the future, unobtrusive advertising will be needed to fund running the platform. It will only be displayed after you consent, and you can withdraw that consent at any time.
How to access it
Crandoro works in any browser and can be installed as an application through its progressive web version, which tells you cleanly when the network drops. Mobile applications for Android and iOS will also be offered. The interface is available in French and English, in light or dark theme.
Frequently asked questions
What is Crandoro?
Crandoro is a social network dedicated to local and global news. The feed is chronological, with a bounded engagement bonus, and the service is designed to send readers back to the original sources.
How is Crandoro different from other social networks?
Crandoro encourages outbound clicks to original sources instead of keeping users inside the platform. Ranking starts from the publication date and engagement only adds a deliberately capped head start, identical for every reader: there is no personalisation and no profiling. Location is optional and approximate, and the service is engineered to be resource-efficient so it stays independent and affordable to run.
Is Crandoro free?
Yes. Access is free. The service will be funded in the future by unobtrusive advertising, displayed only after you give your consent. Your data is not sold.
How do multiple accounts work?
You can run up to three separate public accounts, for example one for work and one for personal use, using the same sign-in credentials. You switch between them without logging out, and every post is published under the active account.
How do I publish automatically from my blog via RSS?
From your account management area, add a syndicated feed by entering its address and the domain it belongs to. You can declare several feeds under the same account, provided you have proved for each one that you own or manage the domain concerned. The system then creates one post per feed item, carrying the link provided by the feed itself. Every post carries a badge showing which feed it came from and leading to that feed's dedicated page, and your account page publicly lists its relayed feeds.
How do I verify that I own my domain?
Add your domain in the dedicated section, then prove that you control it, either by placing a file named crandoro-verification.txt containing the supplied code at the root of your website, or by adding a verification meta tag to your home page.
How do I get the RSS feed of my account?
Every public account exposes a native RSS feed of its posts. It is declared in its page markup and detected automatically by feed readers: simply add the account address to your aggregator.