The site moderator of waffles.fm, the invite-only replacement to OiNK, on Friday tells THREAT LEVEL that the illicit music-sharing site already has some 1,700 exclusive members in less than 24 hours of sporadic operation.

Thousands of invitees are waiting in the wings, as registration is tentatively closed because of server capacity, says site moderator Dead1, who in an exclusive interview with THREAT LEVEL spoke on condition that his real name not be published. "We’ve closed invites due to the extreme amount of traffic," Dead1 says.

Many of those invited were former members of OiNK, he says, and thousands of torrents are being uploaded and seeded.

"We were getting upwards of 100 torrents a minute uploaded," Dead1 says.

The site, running on servers in Amsterdam’s Ripe Network Data Center, was the subject of a denial of service attack following its initial launch Thursday, says Dead1. The DoS attack was at 90MB/s per second, he says.

"That’s pretty big. Whoever did it was pretty pissed off, to put it politely," Dead1 says. "They said they were upset they weren’t sent an invite."

The response to waffles from the BitTorrent community has been overwhelming, he says. When the site went live Thursday, it crashed after its servers were clogged by a barrage of 300 registration requests a minute. "It’s unbelievable," Dead1 says.

The music-sharing-only site, launched nearly two weeks after British authorities raided and shuttered its predecessor OiNK, is a non-profit operation run by a network of 10 people in their twenties or younger, Dead1 says. "It’s purely a hobby," he says. "It’s for fun."

"Most of the staff is in Europe. A couple are in America. A few are in Canada," he adds. "They’re scattered everywhere."

Dead1 says waffles will attempt to follow in OiNK’s footsteps and is not affiliated with any other torrent-tracking site.

"When the link went down, everybody was pretty pissed," he says.

The site is looking to upgrade its servers again, Dead1 says. For now, the site runs off two server boxes, each with 3 gigahertz, dual core Pentium processors, and 4 GBs of RAM, he says.

"We’re not doing this for the pirated material. You can get that anywhere," Dead1 says. "We’re doing it to increase the popularity of artists everywhere no matter who they are."

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