Invites have been re-enabled and the new tutorial and "Gentle Island" now works (at least enough for public testing). So, if you have friends who have been waiting, go ahead and invite them.
For the time being, we request that you NOT invite yourself at a dummy address to run through the tutorial (we're controlling the flow of new people in and recording a lot of stats as part of the testing — alts mess those up). We've posted a summary of how it works (complete with videos) so you can see it for yourself without creating a new character.
The next step is to continue to refine and tweak the current version and extend it (new players are not told anything about cultivation, friends, groups, chat, auctions, towers, visiting others home streets and a lot more). We'll also be re-enabling greeting soon.
For now it is just player-to-player invites. Soon we will also start working through the queue of people who have been waiting for invites (some as long as six months).
We are doing lots of live user testing with people who have never played Glitch to get feedback on pacing and the amount of "directedness" in the new user experience and expect to be iterating on it constantly for the next six weeks or so. This is not the re-launch and does not mean that re-launch is imminent — there's still plenty more to do!