The question is infrastructure. Certainly without an invite system the number of people trying to sign up could have tripled overnight, but a site can't go from a relatively small community instantly to a relatively large one. Voat has been down for some time now because of this issue, while snapzu, because of the decision to limit the influx has remained up.

In principle, I completely agree with you and think the idea of exclusivity is detrimental to a community based service, but in reality the options were to either limit it for a time while upgrading the internal infrastructure to handle more users or to get hugged to death where no one could access it. In that scenario I think the latter option is more fair to the people that have been here well before all us refugees started showing up.