Lichess - Forever Free

Forever Free. Forever Ad-Free. Is such a thing possible in the Internet age?

Forever Free. Forever Ad-Free. How sweet the sound.

Is such a thing possible in the Internet age?

By their nature, institutions default towards a loss of mission and a general stagnancy. It takes vigilance and values to avoid that slippage. Today, I want to share quickly about two radically-different institutions.

Over the pandemic, I began to play a lot of online chess and I began playing on the platform chess.com. They have the prime domain name and their interface is quite good. Yes, there were some bothersome ads, and my free premium only lasted a month, but I was mostly content. I wasn’t aware of an alternative.

But in our times, when you dive into any subculture, you inevitably land up in Internet forums where people know far more than you. There, I learned about lichess.com

So, both chess.com and lichess.com do exactly the same thing.

They are primarily internet chess servers that connect users to one another so they can play games. Both have puzzles, teaching resources, and some analytics capability. But at the end of the day, this is a thousand-year-old-game (roughly). There’s no copyright or intellectual property attached to chess. It’s been public domain. People just want to play.

But one website has 200 employees, makes millions of dollars in revenue (a safe guess), runs a free-mium model and has ads.

And lichess? It’s the alternate vision for the world that many of us have been looking for.

Thibaut Duplessis’ GitHub bio says it all really — Maker of lichess.org, a hippie communist chess server for drug fueled atheists.

(You can’t have a bio and public presence like that if you’re beholden to investors. That’s one aspect of freedom).

Nearly a decade ago, he wrote a blogpost about why lichess.com will always be free (in all senses of the word: free-to-play, no sale of user data, free source code.

He is so invested in transparency that he even publishes the costs to run the website. From the donations that Lichess receives from users, he takes about 58k a year as salary. This is less than what lichess pays to the French govt. in taxes! He is the doyen of an immensely popular, silkily designed website and he voluntarily makes less money than a first-year investment banking analyst — why? He is motivated by something greater.

All around us, there’s an obsession with monetization. And here’s someone who has disavowed monetization in favor of a higher calling.

Nor is he just pumping value into an asset in order to sell it later. Here’s what lichess has to say to investors or potential buyers — “We are not selling, to anyone, for any price. Ever.”

But here’s the best part — lichess is…..better than chess.com.

Sure, there’s some nifty analytic things that chess.com does better. But the presence of ads cancels that out.

No. Here’s a website with droves of full-time developers but a forever-free, open-source website, with one (!!!!) full-time developer, has a better design, better feel, and runs massive servers, too.

This shouldn’t be taken as proof that the little guy always wins because we know that’s not true. It’s heartening, though.

A man had a dream to utilize his skills to create a platform that connected chess players around the world. He realized that dream. He didn’t do it to sell their data. He never asked for their money. He shared his code and took help from the community.

And in a world where we are so used to the…..”well, what’s the catch? When are you going to update the user agreement to start selling my data?” — here we have a coda that we can trust.

Forever Free. Forever Ad-Free.

Merci, Thibaut. What a lovely vision.