Well it's open source (https://github.com/ornicar/lila), and all features are for free, forever, without any ads. That certainly puts it apart form other chess services I know.
Haha I remember that one! A very, very nasty mistake from me.
Lichess was comparing your token to black token, and if it didn't match, it was just assuming that you were the white player. How silly :D
I must mention that it was fixed, indeed, years ago.
lichess opens only one websocket connection, on a port between 9021 to 9029. That port range prevents a weird behavior on firefox when the connection is interrupted.
lichess.org is a game server, and supports real-time playing. The ping is a critical information when you play fast games, it helps to diagnose lagging when it happens.
I just published an update on the blog post: https://lichess.org/@/thibault/blog/lichess-on-scala3-help-n...