Lichess vs Chess.com: the non-player analysis

The user's choice for online chess

Or: how to easy contribute to lichess.org

Chess playing online is now massive, over the last decade, millions of players are into that.Multiplayer games, training, studies, puzzles, tournaments, rating systems, analisys and more.

Begginers and pros are online, a new generation of pros that cames from the online environment are entering real life tournments.

And two platforms concentrates the majority of players: lichess.org and chess.com.

There are tons of articles on the internet about what platform to choose from the players perspective, but under the hood there is a symbolic chess board of our times: the FOSS model versus the proprietary model.

Chess.com was created in 2010 and it's a millionarie company, with hundreds of employess and runs a Freemium business model.

Lichess.org was originnaly created by Thibaultt Duplessis as a hobby project to learn Scala and is a comunnity based and open-source alternative, runned by donations and volunteers.

Quick Non-precise Comparison

Aspect	Chess.com	Lichess.org
Registered users	250M+	10-15M
Daily active users	9.7M	~4M
Business model	Freemium with ads and subscription	100% free, funded by donations
Code	Closed (proprietary)	100% Open Source (GPL)
Team size	668 employees	~80-100 regular contributors + volunteers
Games/day	~28M (average)	5-7M

Join the pawn's army

As you can see at the repository of Lichess on GitHub, Thibaultt plays an important hole at the project, but it's the simplicity and scalability of the tech stack plus the colaborative model made this hobby project almost as big as a multi millionarie company one.

This video explains it better than me. Check it out.

And you can see the Lichess architecture at softwarediagrams.com.

But as the subtitle suggests it's easy to join the pawn's army of Lichess (sorry I can't stop using chess methaphores). And one objective of this blog is to show how to start contributing to FOSS projects even if you not a programmer, let's take a look at that.

You can use your own computer to suppor stockfish analisys, I've being doing that, it's easy and automated.

The fishnet is a distributed Stockfish analysis for lichess.org and as the name self-explains it just uses descentralized and personal computer's power to suport games analisys for lichess players. So cool!

The first step is requesting you personal fishnet key. It's a simple form and the answers takes a few weeks. You are going to receive a key, that you should use like a password to run fishnet.

After the approval you should install and run fishnet. Just select the binary for you platform from the last release,

And then:

# After download:
mv fishnet-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl fishnet
chmod +x fishnet
./fishnet --auto-update

This video also explain how to contribute

You can configure your fishnet by:

./fishnet configure

And you can always turn it on or off. I personally let fishnet running all the time and had no problems.

Hope you liked the post, and lets fishnet every Lichess game!