I’m your lost brother!
I as well sorely missed Reader and then tried fast.ly.
They screwed me when I discovered after the fact that there was a 1K item limit.
Then, I found go read: https://www.goread.io/
A clone of Reader that is also open source! Can’t get better!
I’m running a private instance of it on App Engine so I can bump up the 1K limit. And take my own backups.