The only one I can think of right now would be Font Awesome 5 (via Kickstarter), which already was a very popular product with big name recognition and had a professionally run Kickstarter.
Pretty much ever open source project only survives because developers donate their own time, or companies allow their developers to do so.
And even there, imho Bob (iirc) from the video was right - I hate font awesome 5, and always install either version 4 or "fork awesome" in my projects.
I started a reply stating that one can no longer use <i> elements and must instead include svgs, but then I decided to double check - and found I was wrong all this time... Some minor details have changed, but mostly for the better. Their marketing is a bit annoying too, but that's the price of having a sustainable business model.
I obviously haven't checked version 5 in projects yes, but I guess I should now. So thanks for making me realise my mistake...
How any other open source is funded (e.g. corporate/individual donations, grants, crowdsourcing, support, ancillary products, etc). I don't believe, at least for an MVP, that much funding is needed compared the scope of some of the successfully funded open source projects that exist.
> Most importantly, why would users care about decentralized vs centralized?
They wouldn't. And ideally, beyond the annoying hoops on initial versions (e.g. discovery/identity), they shouldn't. Your software needs to win on features. A self-hosted, subscribable Reddit clone w/ chat would be a very good start.