100%. Lichess is an astounding achievement of FOSS and I wish it got more love in general. I can't think of any other open-source website with as much traffic and with as much complex functionality.

And with multiple paid employees, funded _only_ by small donations. No ads, no corporate sponsors, no investors etc.

I'll vouch for that. I hadn't even heard of lichess, just went looking for an Android chess game to play to pass the time. The app is stellar, and not full of garbage like the others.

My only complaint is how it's pronounced. Can't help but think of leeches.

The website is very lightweight and fully responsive on mobile, and usually has some extra features than the apps.

> Can't help but think of leeches.

Too much fantasy here and “lichess” makes me think of a female lich.

I defaulted to “lie-chess”, and that’s where I’m staying.

That's how I pronounced it initially, and I'm sticking to it also.

Also quality. Lichess has by far the best interface and smoothest experience.

Well financed commercial players like chess.com, chess24, chessbase were never able to replicate it. Lichess which was a one man show for a long time has beaten them all in engineering department and not by a small margin. The difference is just night and day, like driving 30 years old car and modern one.

It's one of the examples of how you can't pay your way to good software. There was a discussion about Discord lately and how it's about userbase only and how you could recreate it spending a fraction of what its valuation is. I don't think you could. I mean apparently you can't even pay your way to get somewhat playable chess site.

Btw, check the git log (or run one if those punch card scripts on the repo). The main programmer is a machine. It's humbling what kind of output a great programmer with great work ethics can achieve.

True. Bullet is unplayable for me on chess.com because of latency but works really well on lichess.

chess24 needs to work on page load performance, but I find watching tournaments more pleasant on chess24 than on lichess.

chess24's default chess board is easier on the eyes than the flat design lichess one.

lichess is amazing for playing though.

to dogpile more -- the lichess open source library is amazing and the site itself is a joy to use.

I also clicked through simply to say lichess is amazing.

Presentation from the original author about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI

Yes, lichess is by far the best platform and a great example of an open source project. The founder had an AMA on reddit a few days ago, it was a very wholesome read - https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

I love the founder's friendly attitude and the idea of an open platform with a strong community.

It reminds me of Dwarf Fortress. Admittedly, DF is not open source, but it's free with a wonderful community and a very transparent development process supported by donations.

I loved everything about this thread. Thank you for sharing.

I've always just used the chess.com app, and have never thought to look for alternatives. Apart from using Open Source, is there any other reason for me to consider switching to lichess?

Free unlimited analysis of your games. Free unlimited puzzles. Basically any reason you might pay for chess.com, lichess has it for free.

Free unlimited puzzles? Oh ok... that’s why I pay the highest subscription level on chess.com. Wow, that’s cool

No ads, no tracking, all features free forever for everyone.

It's just better made all around. The site is sleek. The game renders well, doesn't lag at all even on very old and underpowered devices. The analysis on lichess with wasm stockfish was stolen by chess.com -- there are no premium features and no ads. There is simply no good reason to use any other site.

Seriously. Lichess is solid, featureful, has a huge userbase, and enjoys buy-in at the highest levels: Magnus Carlsen plays there under the alias DrNykterstein. https://lichess.org/@/DrNykterstein

Lots of love here for lichess, and it's well deserved. My son got into chess over a year ago, but when lockdown came I signed him up to Chess Kids, which is pretty good for children who are learning. However, he quickly migrated to lichess, and we've not looked back. It's been an absolute lifesaver during lockdown for my 8 year old son, he learnt an incredible amount from the site. Great tutorials, great puzzles, plus he gets to see some of his chess heroes like Carlson play live. It's a fantastic community. Plus, my son was able to learn pretty much everything, including how to write his own tutorials and how to analyse games, on his own without my assistance, which just demonstrates how good and intuitive the UI is.

I have to add to the commendations of Lichess here. It's amazing. You don't need an account to just jump in and play with people. Amazing stuff.

I have nothing against Kasparov’s efforts, and I’m sure there’s plenty of valuable content on his new site.

But I have to agree that Lichess is an absolute jewel of the chess community, and I’m a happy supporter of it. We don’t need another chess matchmaking site, but it doesn’t sound like Kasparov is trying to compete in that space.

Lichess is one of the best experiences on the web. I build web apps and this one is polished to perfection. It is an example of what is possible when you combine good intentions, great taste, excellent skill and sincere love for the beauty and fun of chess.

The UX is just perfect.

It is an inspiration for me.

Every time I think about lichess, I realize how untrue the generic 'we cannot have good things' platitude is. Everything about lichess just strikes pure joy to me --- open source, no tracking/ ads, feature complete and everything totally free for everyone!

I never knew Lichess is open source and donation supported. I feel so grateful now.

Very Kasparov. No doubt very half-baked, and very self-promotional

lichess has very big problems with the chat, so I won't call it "community first", it's nice if you are just there to play chess, but playing chess with your actual friends its a problem, the chat is heavily censured so having any casual conversation while playing it's hard. To give some examples they ban chat messages that look "similar" to the previous one, so lets say you type a2, and then you type a3 (... a chess position) the last message won't be displayed which is very annoying. This "solution" solves nothing and causes problems, because anyone trying to say something will just try till the message goes through(if you ever noticed that what you typed didnt reach the chat...). Did you make a typo on your phone number/birthdate/address? you can't fix it if it's just the fix to the number, they seem to have been trying to solve with the computer social issues that cant really be solved that way. Besides, there's a very lengthy list of censured words that you can't type, even if you are playing with your actual friends, with people that you may even know in real life, it's insane. I maintain sites frequented by teens and their language is not the best but thats the way teens talk, lichess doesn't welcome the young by doing what its doing now. They are dictating what you can say and not. The funny thing is that I believe the chat is logged forever on their server and there's no indication on the screen of that actually happening, I really wish for my chat history to be deleted, specially because I was not informed about it. Don't get me wrong, I love lichess, but I have pretty much stopped playing when I discovered these things.

When I play chess (on lichess) with my friends, I am typically in the same physical/Discord room with them. We do not need another way to chat.

With everyone else, I'm very happy to be limited to "GL", "HF", "Thanks", "Bye" (localized to their language of choice).

I'm also not trying to make friends/community on lichess, its not like WoW or Dota where teams matter to the actual game. Historically, chess teams existed because of geographical boundaries. People needed other chess players of a similar level to: 1. get better at chess, 2. amortize the costs of traveling to a tournament, 3. try to estimate their global ranking to satisfy ego.

Players on the same chess teams happened to become very good friends because of the time commitment to the game and therefore each other. Eventually the friendships were the more important commitment. However, with lichess (or just the internet in general), I can satisfy all 3 benefits of having a chess team by playing alone on lichess and have really great friends orthogonal of chess (especially since travel isn't part of my chess hobby's time commitment).

Whatever they're doing, it's kind of nice to have far fewer homophobic slurs hurled in the lichess chat in comparison to other chess servers.