what’s the incentive to switch over to Lemmy?

The whole premise is that there is a significant part of Reddit's userbase that don't want to be "on" Reddit, yet they can't find their niche communities elsewhere.

Having a way to bridge the content away from Reddit is (or should be) the incentive for them.

This may help bring lurkers over.

By bringing lurkers, you are solving one side of the "chicken-and-egg" problem.

Like I said in other comments: I had ~50 subreddits I was subscribed to, but I was an active participant on maybe 4 of them. Thanks to the mirrors, I could drop all of my Reddit usage and have access to all the content directly from Lemmy.

As an user, my remaining problem is that these 4 subreddits where I was still participating don't have as many "real people", and then there are two ways to solve this:

• By creating two-way communication (which is okay, but still works in favor of Reddit)
• By promoting Lemmy as an alternative and bringing more people from Reddit (which is ideal)

The former is being worked on, but as many others already chimed in, it puts the project at the mercy of Reddit. This system is a clear a violation of their TOS and they could outright break it.

The latter is a lot harder to do and it basically requires a coordinated effort of as many people in a pool of ~30k people to act as evangelists to reach out to a group of mostly ADHD-riddled and tech-unsavvy users.