I second this. Inoreader's UI is much better than Google reader ever was. Being a free user, I am still unable to explore much of the functionality they offer, but I hope to be a subscriber soon.
Same for me. Digg reader is now so good, that I can no more say if Google Reader was better or not. Even if google relaunches Google Reader, I will not use it. After they killed Reader I've realized how important is not to bet all on one company and nowadays I prefered diversification (dropbox, digg, spotify) rather then all in one.
"1 year/1000 posts" refers only to unread posts, which makes sense to me. If you have thousands of unread posts, chances are you don't care that much about them.
I'm not sure what their policy on read posts is. I'm a premium user and a quick search shows up a (read, but not liked or shared) post from 2011. It says here that liked and shared posts are stored forever:
Feature which is still available to those who self host :) My TinyTinyRSS database has 359533 posts stored, taking a whooping 559MB. I frankly don't get why they have such low limits to paying customers. Storing a whole 1GB on S3 would cost them just 3¢ of the monthly $3. Unless they also scrape images from posts...?
Since this seems to be the thread for alternatives...
Someone at the time of Reader's demise recommended Selfoss, and I've been running it ever since. It's not quite as good, but it does what I wanted from Reader.
I also use Selfoss, it does what I need it to. Although the author's decision to override the Space key is odd. I comment that part of the JS and let the aggregated js regenerate to return that behavior to the browser.
I really like the privacy features of TheOldReader.com -- especially their commitment so far to have no tracking (with cookies etc.) or user data harvesting to serve ads. They do have some select sponsored ads for the free-tier, but done without any such tracking [1].