Last week I gave a talk on the history of decentralisation, or at least my history with it. One of my examples of a successful case of decentralisation is Minecraft vs Lego Universe. Both quite similar games, but Minecraft totally crushed Lego and out-scaled it to an insane degree. As far as I can tell this is largely because Minecraft was much more decentralised (mods, user run servers). In particular Lego Universe was crippled by the cost of centralised content moderation that Mojang simply didn't have at all.

There are examples of decentralised user-owned cooperative type systems outscaling and outperforming centralised alternatives. I'm uncertain to what extent you can make sweeping generalisations ... there certainly seem to be more cases of successful centralised platforms than decentralised, but this is partly because we tend to view decentralisation as an absolute rather than as a spectrum, and partly because a few companies with very strong hiring pipelines have subsidised the creation of vast quantities of centralised software.