Network effects are also somehow not working very well for decentralised things, possibly because everyone wants to fork Product X but no one wants to improve it for added discoverability or less bugs.

for example Substack is a good upgrade to social media. It's centralized, but people have to pay their favorite writers. They do this to avoid bs, ads, being a product. The important part of Substack is that if the platform screw the authors over, they have control over their email lists (unlike social media), and they can just move somewhere else.

So a platform like Substack is a move in the right direction vs. something like Twitter.