All their finances are also public: https://lichess.org/costs
I'm not sure what to think, but that's definitely interesting. I wonder what chess.com is paying their engineers.
So I literally dusted off an old Android tablet and played one game. Pleased to see I got logged right in to my lichess account, played a 10 + 5 unrated, did game review. I think this should be great for everybody all around, and as others have expressed I hope lichess doesn't get caught up in some business grief. The game review was not earth-shattering but decent move-by-move explanation that I think will help a lot of players, especially newer players.
I will stick to playing on lichess in browser, on a 43" tv monitor, running and reading local Stockfish eval., without the English explan.
Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.
I hope this deal helps two things: (1) Bring more people to Chess, (2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.
Keep on the amazing work,
[0] https://lichess.org/@/revoof/blog/optimizing-the-tablebase-s...
The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.
Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.
Even my diamond platinum extreme chess.com subscription (or however the third-best tier of a dozen or so is called) has much less functionality than Lichess's only tier.
With just a few employees, it is quite interesting to compare how much do some of these contributions cost, effectively affecting only a person or two, compared to a service like Lichess which is used by 5-10 million of users each month.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
Their Oauth requires to special app registration nor any oauth secrets - only platform I have seen that does that.
I do wonder how this opens up ability for people to integrate Lichess’ player pool to their own apps.
It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly more amount of money.
It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
Lichess is a beacon of hope and congrats to the lichess team for this cooperation with TTT.
The best thing they did was that they bought an amazing domain name.
I'm sure they'll be crying all the way to the bank.
> I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
I also hope they manage to avoid becoming dependent on whatever this deal grants them.
FIDE and chess.com did behave pretty shitty sometimes and I think its good Magnus is in a position to counter them a bit.
chess67 looks interesting from my perspective as a coach and club organizer, especially for running tournaments and gaining exposure for my coaching and events.
But I do wonder where the boundary is long term. If more tools start tapping into the player pool, there’s probably a balance between staying open and preventing people from just free riding on the Lichess ecosystem.
Either way, it’s pretty unique. You don’t really see that level of accessibility elsewhere in the chess world.
That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
Flashback to a moment in my life where a team pushed (successfully) for building a distributed architecture for an app that we didn't even knew if it had product market fit yet. Fast forward 3 years to today and the app is no longer online, but while it had 5 users they were using really reliable infrastructure, I guess that's cool.
> Magnus Carlsen, co-founder of Take Take Take, will not be actively promoting the platform at launch. With Take Take Take now offering a full play and learning experience, it enters territory that conflicts with his ambassador agreement with Chess.com. He remains a co-founder and the company's largest shareholder, and the team expects his involvement to resume once those contractual constraints change. For now, the product will have to speak for itself.
I can imagine a lot of small apps buy into serverless at a time where it’s legitimately the most cost-effective solution and then they’re stuck because serverless platforms are easy to lock yourself into.
This. I kind of wish if more people knew about it. Also even 1% can be too big. I mean Lichess is literally having millions of people if not more, It's definitely within the 0.001% group.
I kind of wish to do something in this space in the future, I do feel like its just that people don't know about it. I have been thinking to approach some companies and just tell them how much they can save if they migrate and use open source solutions and these dedi servers and setting things on top of these dedi's/vps's.
I have been thinking of (within future), to contact a few companies and to actually have them save net money from migration while charging them a few hundred bucks a month and I can just have a very handful selection of companies (say 15-20) to have enough money so that I can eat french fries and manage their servers!
It feels a win-win-win situation for everyone except AWS/GCP/Azure who wish to suggest that scalability is hard etc. and this false premise for most if not essentially* all businesses.
Personally, I am also saying things like slack for example, I don't understand why people might want slack when things like matrix exist and can be self-hosted securely with proper 3-2-1 backups and for most intents and purposes is actually good if not better than slack.
To me, a bit of concern though with this and I am not sure if it is well-founded is what if I set these servers for them, now I will wish to set them up so that they have as little errors as possible but what if the companies start to think that I am doing nothing and then they stop paying my contracts after I have set them up on these dedicated. I guess I hope that they believe in the value of human support and I guess I am also a bit unsure of where do I find such businesses are.
My brother does some freelancing on the side and I ask him these things and he mentions that mostly he has to use AWS, I mention why not dedi and he says that he does what he is asked to do and that company wants him to use AWS so he uses AWS, so I guess within this context, I need companies who are atleast interested in being a bit more open about thinking about dedicated servers.
I am sure that there would be companies interested in all of this and I am interested in doing things for them but I am not sure about the middle part of connecting the two. I would be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts on all of this and have a nice day emsh!
He's not the first person to be "really good at chess".
It's a broad statement meant to mean "celebrities have too big of a platform and too much influence over the average joe".
Take Take Take will use Lichess as the infrastructure of their new play zone, in a win for open source
Key details:
Earlier this year, Take Take Take approached us with a unique proposal. Rather than building their own proprietary play zone from the ground up (a “walled garden”), Take Take Take have asked us to share our “digital commons” and use our infrastructure and play zone.
At first, we considered the proposal with caution, and maybe even some wariness. Lichess has often been approached by companies who don’t understand us or our values, and just want to use or even exploit our players and community. But after careful scrutiny, and getting to know the team behind Take Take Take, we think this cooperation has the potential to be a real positive for chess as a whole.
For chess enthusiasts and players, it represents more healthy competition within the chess ecosystem. Competition and having more choice is inherently a good thing for any market, including chess. It forces money that was originally destined to be paid out as dividends or funnelled up to institutional investors to be reinvested back into chess. It means that innovation by making genuinely useful new features, or arranging major tournaments and events, must occur in order for a service to stand out. This ultimately improves what’s on offer to the chess community and to chess players, forcing all online platforms to step up their game. Healthy competition and a more diverse market should be welcomed by our peers who truly wish to grow the game.
Beyond supporting more market options within chess, we also view this as a major win for Lichess and for free/libre open-source software as a whole. Instead of Take Take Take building and maintaining another walled garden for millions of dollars, like several expensive foibles before them, they realised we already offer a free and available digital commons, and asked if they could help us expand it. By choosing our open-source software instead of building their own proprietary play zone, this is a significant recognition of our software already being the best in the market.
This kind of model is adopted quite often in the open-source space. For example, various Linux distributions are open-source, and are the backbone of the internet with the majority of web servers running Linux. But even though that code is open-source and can be used or forked, it’s the scaling and technical know-how which is packaged. Similarly, we’re providing Take Take Take the expertise of our developers, infrastructure, moderation and general operations, who have been maintaining and improving Lichess as a whole for over 15 years.
The games played using Take Take Take will be running on Lichess. New players, including those finding us via Take Take Take, will sign up for Lichess accounts, and they will play on our servers and use our infrastructure. They’ll have the same data rights and protections we give all of our community, and our same high level of moderation. Ultimately, they are Lichess games, being treated exactly like Lichess games should be treated. That’s Lichess becoming more than just a playing platform, but becoming an infrastructure layer for free online chess generally.
At the same time, our independence, our philosophy and values remain non-negotiable. Lichess will always remain free and open. Our software will always remain open source. Any play zone using Lichess must always be free to play, even if other tools are built around it which are not. And we must and will have complete integrity of user data, user privacy, and moderation actions.
Equally, the Take Take Take team have very much understood that, and given us a lot of openness and transparency. They understand that we’ve built something which began as a hobby site, and has grown into a major global platform, serving millions of players a day, instantaneously transmitting thousands of moves a second, giving the best experience for fast time controls. That we’ve taken technical optimisation as far as we can, but also organisational optimisation, with content, broadcasts, moderation, and administration being done on less than 1% of Chess.com's estimated annual revenue. They understand what we’ve achieved, and that’s why they’ve chosen to trust us to be their play zone. As the chess market has become increasingly monopolised, enshittified, and surely even corrupted from an original vision, we similarly must adapt to ensure the chess community isn’t trapped and exploited for private gain.
We’re intrigued and keen to see how this cooperation changes things within the chess ecosystem, as we stay true to our philosophies and values. While we can sometimes feel like an isolated pawn in a commercialised landscape, it’s always refreshing when we find like-minded allies who want the best for chess and recognise our vision for that. Now, through the unpredictable nature of the game, we find ourselves in a pawn phalanx with Take Take Take, and a global community supporting us and believing, like us, that chess belongs to everyone. We’re looking forward to sharing chess with more people, together.
You can read the announcement from Take Take Take's perspective, on their site also.
Reuters
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While feedback to this announcement has broadly been positive, a number of members of our community have raised concerns that we want to address. These concerns are reasonable, and were also raised by members of the Lichess team during discussions about this cooperation agreement - so we definitely hear where you're coming from. The majority of the Lichess team are unpaid volunteers, who have given hundreds to thousands of hours to Lichess. Please believe that we also want what is best for Lichess and are committed to its values.
Are TTT just using Lichess's playerbase to kickstart their own app, and planning to run their own play zone in the future, effectively stealing the Lichess players?
This was the initial concern from many in the Lichess team! The way we see it now, having more "players" in the chess platform ecosystem is a good thing, driving innovation. For us, strategically, there were several possible paths:
Is it possible that TTT separate to their own play zone in future?
Yes! However, Lichess will still be here, offering everything we do for free and without adverts or tracking - so we think we will still be able to comfortably compete - just like we do currently with other platforms.
Are Lichess users now the "product" for TTT, and are unwillingly commodified?
The "product" is that we have provided relaxed rules regarding API access for playing games. This API access is already publicly available in a limited form to anyone else, including several commercial eBoard manufacturers. Just as you could already be playing against a user on a DGT board or a ChessUp board, you could also now be facing someone using a "TTT board" (their app). The benefit for you is that you have more choice. More choice of platforms with which to interface with Lichess and more users to play against using these platforms.
Does Lichess lose some of its autonomy by receiving income from a corporation?
In short, no. Although we understand the concerns, the agreement in place does nothing to restrict Lichess's activity, decision making, or values (free and open source). The vast majority of income is expected to remain as user donations. The contributions by TTT will be made to compensate for extra load on our servers, and our team - but do not entitle TTT to influence over our decisions beyond this.
Are there concerns about the involvement of Peter Thiel as a TTT investor?
We share the community concerns about the influence and reach of Thiel, but we wouldn't have entered this agreement without doing our diligence there. Our understanding is that one of the many investment funds Thiel has invested in, contributed to TTT. The exact proportion of the investment can only be answered by TTT but we would not have entered this agreement if we were not confident and comfortable that the exposure to Thiel is incidental and extremely small. We see this more as an unfortunate side-effect of the wealth inequality in the world - that most enterprises come into some contact with the ultra wealthy and those whose values may not align.
Will user data be sold?
No, the only information shared with TTT is already publicly available. By playing on Lichess through TTT you would share your username, and grant an authorisation token for access - that does not share additional information, only the ability to play games. Other information such as games played is already available for all at database.lichess.org. Private data such as IP addresses, email addresses, messages, etc is never shared - please refer to https://lichess.org/privacy for full details.
Are Lichess player donations now supporting TTT indirectly?
No, donations from our community will only ever be spent on Lichess, and the additional costs imposed by TTT will be covered solely by TTT.
Is this splitting the community?
Our hope is that this will bring more players to Lichess (as the TTT play zone will show "powered by Lichess", and that players will be able to enjoy aspects of both platforms.
Why wasn't the Lichess community consulted?
Lichess has always operated through internal decision making among our team members both for efficiency and for consistency. However, we do take the concerns of the community seriously (as hopefully shown by our openness in responses here). We hope that you trust that we do have Lichess's best interests at heart, or we wouldn't volunteer so much of our personal time and energy to the project.
Are there risks to Lichess?
Yes, and we believe we are going into this with our eyes open to those risks (such as those shared above). We are hopeful and positive about this cooperation but will always remain vigilant to ensure we remain independent, and open for everyone. We also felt there were risks with not entering this agreement - primarily a non-competitive market reducing Lichess's visibility, as monopolies are never a good thing.