Lichess rating compared to standard rating

@tpr
While it would be nice if new lichess members with a FIDE rating were given an initial rating equal to their FIDE rating, it would be nearly impossible to verify. User input is unreliable; there are many accounts with 3000 as the listed FIDE rating.

@caughtinarut
You make some good arguments which I appreciate but your points are not quite right. First, rating systems that measure chess performance are actually objective. Objective just means, well let me quote, "(of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.". Glicko only considers win/loss/draw, opponent's rating and some other technical numbers. It's impervious to personal feelings or opinions. What you may have been thinking of is the difference between something that has an absolute value vs something that has a relative value. And while chess ability certainly is relative, that in no way prevents us from obtaining objective measurments regarding it. Speed for example is also relative, but we use instuments to measure speed all the time.
The composition of the player pool is an interesting and somewhat complicated matter but it can be handled very effectively. First your example about large numbers of low ability or high ability players all joining at once is very hypothetical because the size of the Lichess player pool is sufficiently large that the likelyhood of overall lichess ratings being thrown off in this manner is very low. It would require something truly weird happening. Furthermore it's well established that the composition of almost all player pools including Lichess and FIDE follows a normal distrubution/ bell shaped curve.
What could pose a problem though is that the overall ability level is higher in the FIDE player pool. However the solution to this is not nearly as drastic as the one you suggested. You don't need all Lichess players to have a FIDE rating you only need a healthy sample. If we just have a few players with FIDE ratings that also play here with their best efforts, then there are enough data points to see how to adjust Lichess ratings to closely match FIDE ELO. You could do periodic calibrations to fine tune it better but it wouldn't be that important as the overall composition of both is relatively stable.
I'd like to hear you tell me caughtinarut, or anyone, why this wouldn't work?

If you want to know your FIDE rating, can't you play FIDE chess?

I don't know why it doesn't work, but it doesn't work.

There are nms and fms who have higher lichess ratings than ims and gms. That's just the way it is. There is not a close correlation between a fide otb rating and your lichess online rating.

Accept it.

Of course there is a correlation between the ratings here and FIDE in general. IN GENERAL! You cannot disprove it by some some hundreds of counter examples when it works for thousands well. That‘s the way fitting and approximation works.

See formula once again which works pretty well for me and many, many others:

lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/how-to-estimate-your-fide-rating-conversion-formula-inside#1

Here you will see many outliers but the majority has some correlation, yes, it’s the „ribbon“/„milky-way“ in the middle like a backbone. It‘s black because -believe it or not- there are the most points. You see it?

imgur.com/a/nWy4

No correlation would mean: points are spreaded randomly and NO „milky-way“ in the middle visible. Admittedly it is rather broad so it‘s fair to call it a loose correlation. It‘s up to you to name it weak or strong.