The Internet's best online platform is European

I am far from alone in feeling that the best days of the Internet are behind us. In 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which Macquarie Dictionary definesas follows:

“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Doctorow breaks down the above-mentioned deterioration in three stages:

First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

The seeds of this sad evolution were sown with those very first platforms to claim the moniker “social platforms”. I embraced Facebook wholeheartedly in 2006 as a 14-year old awkward teenager. Photo sharing, wall writing, solidifying passing connections at MUN conferences and more. It was lovely.

Throughout my university days (2011-16), I developed a love/hate relationship with Facebook and Twitter. I found the platforms very useful for trying to spread my genuinely felt pro-European political messages. Yet a few friends and I tried and ultimately failed to create a separate platform (pretentiously named Prisma Politica) for Danish political science students. Facebook’s network effects were far too powerful, even as the second stage of enshittification was in full swing with annoying things like the removal of “the wall” and the nefarious algorithmic feed that replaced the good old chronological stream of posts from my friends - and no one else.

Though our attempt to create a parallel network was doomed to fail from the start, I still think of Prisma Politica with nostalgia. We took the fight to the dominant platform and failed, and at the core of our fight-back was something so utterly outdated as the “forum board”. And now, I truly think of “forum boards” as the time I enjoyed the promise of the Internet the most.

Back in 2004, aged 13, I was first a member of a fun “forum community” centered on the Halo series of video games. I then created my very own forum community focused on Lord of the Rings, and later a jointly created fantasy world. At its peak, the site had around 100 active users from dozens of countries. I considered many of these people - with user names like Ariakas, Pezza and Brannalbincaptainofthenorth as my friends - even though I had never met them in real life. I learned about books and music and even girlfriends from them. All within a self-contained community built entirely on a free-to-use forum board. It all died out after a few years, but damn, those were some glory days for a geeky kid like me.
That was for me the promise of the Internet at that time. Connecting with people from all over the world over shared interests or after taking part in shared events in the real world. I had no one to play Lord of the Rings The Strategy Miniatures Game with in my local area. No problem: I could play by proxy over a friggin’ forum board with my internet friends from New Zealand, Norway and New York.

What happened to calling it “The Internet”?

I honestly think the deterioration started setting in when we stopped referring to the online world as “the Internet” and started using the term I have grown to truly despise: “social media”. The Internet as a term somehow seemed closer to the idealistic roots of the project in the late 90s and early 2000s: A decentralised entity where anyone anywhere could make a basic website and where no one owned or tried to exploit anyone else. A place to discuss, to play, to laugh, to learn, to dive deep into rabbit holes engendered not by ad-based algorithms but word-of-mouth from friends.
I know that this is a rose-tinted version of the past and that the seeds of exploitation were to be found even when I roamed the world wide web. Yet the spirit of “the true Internet” is not dead. And even as politicians and common folk alike bemoan the lack of European online giants to compete with the American tech bros and their empires, I tell them that they are bemoaning the wrong thing. In fact, the Internet’s very best online platform was founded in Europe - and in France no less.

Enter 2019 when a colleague (and subsequent friend) invited me to play chess with him on Lichess. “Lichess?” I asked, “Why not Chess.com?”. He simply told me that it was better. No ads. No “freemium" models. No bullshit. I accepted and I have never looked back.

Earlier, I had played online chess on Chess.com. I was never very good, but I did have months-long stints of chess mania. And yes, I confess I even paid for some of that site’s “premium” features for short stints. And when I stopped paying, they would not stop pestering me to come back and pay more. Until I left for good. And kind of left online chess, too. Until my friend brought me to Lichess. The utopian, anarchistic antithesis to the growing capitalist mastodon of Chess.com. The latter would later acquire other online chess platforms and start-ups, including those started by Magnus Carlsen, the best player in the world. It was, is and always has been ripe for enshittification.

Lichess is amazing because it is focused on its core purpose: Let players play chess with each other. Learn chess on your own - or together. Find a coach. Create a community. And guess what: The main way of communicating in these communities is through forum boards!

Lichess is not only open source. It’s got a slick user interface with tons of features. It is entirely free with no locked features at all. It has no ads. In fact, on the “About Lichess” page, gives you tips on the best free, open-source ad and malware blockers. And unlike the so-called social platforms, it allows and encourages other users to build their own servers and communities on top of the Lichess digital infrastructure. I have gotten involved in the so-called Lichess4545community where thousands of players arrange and play in organised team tournaments dedicated to longer time-control games of chess. Something that would be hard to make happen without an open and user-friendly platform like Lichess. And 4545 is also 100% volunteer-driven. It has “moderators” with funky usernames exactly like in my childhood days of forum board moderators for themed communities.

To anyone who has a faltering belief in the Internet as it was once promised to us, I recommend this “Ask Me Anything” session with the founder of Lichess, Frenchman Thibault. It brought back my own belief.

For open source to thrive, it needs patrons

So all of this awesome promise aside, how the hell does Lichess work if it’s all free - including the lack of ads and data mining and selling? Simple: Through donations. All costs and expenditures are publicly available. And it’s all funded by volunteers who choose to donate any amount (small or large) for any number of months.

Why pay for something that’s free anyway? Classic collective action problem. For me, it’s become simple: Because it’s worth supporting a project that tries to live up to the true spirit and promise of a free, decentralised and user-experience-focused Internet. I’ve been a Lichess patron for 61 months at the time of writing (and remember, I am an average amateur chess player at best). It was an eye-opener for me. And since then, I have used Patreon to support other niche projects like Stephen West’s Philosophize This! that seek to provide us with knowledge, insight and genuine engagement. In parallel, I have rid myself of as many “social media apps” as possible. Mostly, I now only use direct messaging apps like WhatsApp and Discord. Lichess triggered this behavioural shift because it is not “just” open source. The user experience is literally BETTER than on the competing, capitalist-model alternatives.

That is my ode to Lichess. It’s an online platform that puts users first and stays focused on providing an amazing core service. It opened my eyes to a truly well-functioning model based entirely on volunteer contributions. It’s awesome. It’s fun. It has spawned countless communities. And it has forum boards. It’s as close as we’ll get to the promised land of an anarchist cyberspace for the benefit of all.