Have a look at Nostr: https://nostr.com/protocol

Nostr is definitely at effort at decentralization. In practice it doesn't have a way to incentive running a node (relay) so became quite centralized. Aside from that, it's quite a privacy nightmare (leaks ip everywhere) and became a vehicle to shill Lightning Network tokens.

Lightning uses incentives to keep nodes online, so it wouldn't be too difficult to leverage those incentives for Nostr with Zaps (earning a couple of sats per message for running a node and losing them if it goes offline for instance). However this would require a decentralized consensus system to assess node reputations.

I see no NIP for node incentives, perhaps this should be discussed further.