It's still growing. Development is active, people post plenty of interesting stories. Commenting is slowly increasing. These things take time, and the core group of posters are still posting links on a daily basis which is what a nascent community needs to survive the initial "lull".
>Not for exclusivity, but rather, invitations will be used as a spam-control mechanism. New users must be invited by a current member and invitations will be unlimited (unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new accounts). If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed.
I'm very hopeful for Lobsters.