I recently came across a torrent that seems to be an archive of Reddit. It got me thinking if it would be possible to make it locally browsable. However, I also considered the possibility that someone might have already addressed this by creating a public Lemmy instance, enabling the content to be accessible from any federated instance.
I don’t think so. There’s a lot of Reddit posts, and mirroring them all would take quite a while.
If you felt like it, you could probably import that into an instance of your own, but that would not be a small amount of involvement. You also have problems with things like comments, since you’re either having to create a local replica of the relevant accounts and all of that on top.
None of which is a small amount of work, and might be more work than it’s worth, when you could either mirror new content live with bots, or simply create new content over on Lemmy for less. It’ll take some time to get established, but it is much less work and troubleshooting, by comparison.