You can debate all other surrounding stuff being influenced by the author's politics but this one is purely about him being able to implement it and the commercials competitors failing spectacularly.
It's not unique to Lichess btw, back in the day ICC had smooth, responsive gameplay as well. It was commercial and it was great.
I don't see what's communist about it. It's just that the developer has arrived at "charity" via the route of communism. The biggest societal difference is that chess.com allows people to play chess for a living, whereas a free platform does not.
TD is the one who who articulated it this way, and there are pretty strong logical and operative links between his ideas and actions.
There are lots of differences between chess.com and Lichess, societal and otherwise.
Anyway, I'm not claiming that Lichess is superior in every way, just that it's great and unique. There are lots of successful companies/startups/sites operating on the chess.com mindset. Lichess is quite unique.
> Save the trees
> Maker of lichess.org, a hippie communist chess server for drug fueled atheists
In Thibault's case, he has consciously and deliberately made it so that his political views do affect choices at all levels. A lot of it is quite direct. If you are "communist^," then you think differently about login, data retention. You make feature decisions differently. You also make hiring/expansion/strategy decisions differently.
Chess.com needs to worry about free-paid conversion rates, crippling features to differentiate subscription plans, analytics people/code to tie it all together. Those require code, infrastructure. They come with performance costs, technical debt. Thibault has explicitly identified these, and deliberately carved advantages out of them. What can you do with much less bloat.
Even just having more money has disadvantages, besides the obvious advantages. You now have teams and senior people responsible for analytics, commercial performance, an extensive (and restrictive) streamer sponsorship program. You have a bigger accounts dept. etc. Modern companies have a lot of bloat, and administrative analogues to technical debt.
That stuff inevitably leads to a difference in product, even if you had the exact same programers. Environments matter. Thibault is trying to win. I like it.
^I'm going to call this ideology "Thibault Communism" to keep it narrow.