There are whole instances dedicated to mirroring Reddit. However a lot of people on the fediverse oppose such features, on my home instance eg. lemmit is filtered out of /all stream. https://lemmit.online/
connaisseur
It helps to keep a backup account on another instance, in case there is an issue with your main server. You can export your settings and subscriptions from your main account and import to another Lemmy instance.
Each instance of Lemmy has their own list, like so: https://feddit.org/instances https://feddit.nl/instances
Without an installed desktop environment on your Pi, you will not be able to use GUI apps, not even remotely. You would have to install it on the Pi first.
You could setup a new, empty VM and use it as a download only machine for packages, although it makes the process a bit more complicated.
Since I had to deal with some representatives of SUSE corp, I can say that the whole experience was just plain horrible. Don‘t like that company at all and thus am not surprised that the name change topic is even discussed at all.
Have a smartphone ready and record a video clip when/if it happens again.
You are right, this is a 1:1 mirror of Reddit without any Lemmy user interactions. Since it is a one way mirror, any comments would not reach Reddit, I assume this is why it was decided to keep the communities closed down in such a way.