isoHunt, the group now best known for launching The Old Pirate Bay, has shared an update a week after debuting The Open Bay. The Pirate Bay, the most popular file sharing website on the planet, still isn’t back following police raids on its data center in Sweden, but its “cause” is very much alive.

The Open Bay, which lets anyone with “minimal knowledge of how the Internet and websites work” deploy their own version of The Pirate Bay online, is becoming an open source engine of The Pirate Bay website, the group told VentureBeat in an email. “The fate of Open Bay is now in the hands of worldwide community.”

So far, 372 “copies” of The Pirate Bay have been created thanks to the project. The torrent database dump, which combines content from isoHunt, KickassTorrents (via its public API), and The Old Pirate Bay, has seen 1,256 downloads to date.

The Open Bay has been forked 522 times and starred 1,841 times. As a result, it is this week’s most popular project on GitHub.

In an email to VentureBeat, the isoHunt team explained its plan moving forward:

We want to give people opportunity to speak their minds, determine needs and be active participants in evolution of oldpiratebay.org. A lot of requests were received for wide range of features on the site. But we want emphasize the development process so we call to the colors of this enormous and devoted community to create the new features requests and code those features here. In as much as the original Pirate Bay future is uncertain it would be certainly fair to let Old Pirate Bay go in the caring hands of this community. Our current goal is not only make it open source, but eventually provide fully decentralized torrent database for the community. We call out our torrent community to join in to develop and enhance this engine to create a modern and advanced website that every user all around the world would want to use. And to make it possible for those of you who want to run your own copy of Pirate Bay.

Speaking of “the original” Pirate Bay, the only official statement the group has released so far was on December 15, and at the time it hadn’t yet decided if it would return. Since then, thepiratebay.se domain has shown signs of life, although the site itself has not relaunched.

Yet the activity has naturally resulted in rumors about its imminent return. The site currently has a counter for how many days it has been down, a BitTorrent Sync key that gives access to various The Pirate Bay files, and a magnet link for a 1080p copy of Sony Pictures’ The Interview.

In fact, a cartoon image of Kim Jong-Un is currently overlaid on the pirate flag waving on the site. This flag, by the way, is hosted on The Open Bay, the meaning of which the isoHunt team did not know when we asked them earlier this week.

That hasn’t changed, but the group told us today that it is “glad” and now sees the use of the image as a sign of “support” from The Pirate Bay. The larger plan for thepiratebay.se, however, is still unknown.