This is my thoughts as well. I’ve noticed that once one or two people express interest in a post, it tends to get much more traffic

I used to lurk like crazy on reddit. I had a nearly 12 year old account that mainly had a few comments here and there months apart, and only a few posts but ever since moving to Lemmy I've found myself actually posting relatively frequently to help build some of the smaller communities I'm in that have also migrated.

Only if the content is organic. Look at !photoshopbattles@lemmy.world . Full of bot posts from reddit with 0 comments. Even if one of them gets a comment, it would get drowned out by the subsequent bot posts. Blindly filling a community with bot posts would eventually make people unsub from it.

It depends on the content.

Some of content really depends on OP being in the comments, like AmITheAsshole. Just reposting doesn't give the kind of interaction that the original post would have.

Ongoing discussion—i.e., comments replying to other comments, not just posts—drives engagement as much as content. If the post-to-comment ratio is too high, active commenters are less likely to encounter each other in the sea of automated posts.

You're doing it right. That's exactly how to build momentum! 💪