Honestly yes I think it makes sense to do this, as long as the content itself isn't hosted on reddit. It would be cool if somebody could make a bot for mods to enable this in their communities to specify subs to pull posts from and how often.
I created a bot like this. https://github.com/daniel-lxs/BotIt
It's intended for links and I wouldn't encourage using it for anything else, as you said I think the best idea is to crosspost content that isn't on reddit on the first place, and just use reddit as a way to measure how engaging is the post.
This is so far a work in progress so expect bugs. But in my opinion, the bot is usable in this stage.
Edit: I might add multiple subreddit and magazine/community support, so you could specify a map and pull from many places to post in many places, stay tuned.
I created !maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world a few days ago. Now it has >4k subscribers. I credit that to my meticulous reposting of content from other places (90% from /r/maliciousompliance, 10% from elsewhere). It took a bit of effort but now people are posting their OC.
A site like this needs to reach critical mass to be self-sustaining. I see a lot of new communities with 0-1 posts from the mod. Thatβs not nearly enough to get people engaged - users are going to see that itβs a ghost town and leave. Reposts are a temporary measure to get past the chicken-and-egg problem of "there's nothing here so people aren't visiting" and "people aren't visiting so they aren't posting stuff".
Reddit itself exists on reposts. As a (ex-)Redditor of 12 years, I've seen countless reposts. Ideally, reposts make up a small percentage of the content, but given the small nature of this universe, I'd personally encourage and advocate reposting of content from elsewhere to kickstart discussion.
I'm of two minds about it. On one hand it would give Lemmy users more content to interact with which is good, on the other you're directing to where we just came from and increasing engagement there which is bad. So I'm on the fence. If someone wants to do it it's worth the experiment IMO, but I'm largely not going to be clicking that Reddit link unless its compelling. If it's linked to an external site aside from reddit I'm all for it though, so long as it doesn't get out of hand.
The only option for me should be taking posts content and bringing here without the Reddit link, only mentioning it comes from there and giving credits to the OP, I won't open Reddit links.
I'm already happy with the amount of content here and actually a bit lost with all the variety of content, instances, new communities, links. No great need to look back. But if you need to find equivalent communities, lookie here: https://sub.rehab/
I think it could be worth for the more news related subs to maybe use bots that pull at least the more upvoted submissions until they've got a more solid user base that submits more stuff themselves. Reposting the same old Reddit reposts from 15 years ago however I think is not worth it.
Reddit was all about reposting content. Whether it was from news sites or twitter, it was full of it. There's no reason why that couldn't be done here. Especially in early days.