Hello World!

Welcome to the official re-launch of Instill, a small indie-focused platform for communities!

Instill started out as a concept micro-publishing platform for research papers. Then it pivoted to a small community for supporting PhDs and post-docs in getting their pre-prints ready for publishing. This turned out to be difficult to coordinate, as many of the requests for help needed more fundamental assistance on the side of experimental design.

After a few months of re-thinking and prototyping, we’re now at the stage of re-launching Instill (https://instill.xyz) as a micro-community tool. It aims to combine popular tools and interaction dynamics like Hacker News, Stack Exchange, and dev.to to foster a place for people to share ideas, ask for help, and “slow discussions” of science in a deeper way. We’ve found that this fosters deeper understanding and more critical thinking of basic science, which then ultimately yields better research papers.

The new Instill moves away from being just a “place for pre-print assistance” and re-introduces the idea of “micro-publications”, but less in the style of biorxiv or published papers, and more in the style of Substack. Of course, we’ll still allow researchers to ask for collaborators or help on their preprints.

Additionally, the tool is built as a platform to support more publishing and community interaction dynamics and use cases.

There’s still much to do, but here’s to taking this thing live before it’s ready!