#webrings

If you've been making or reading comics on the internet for any length of time, you've seen this happening. A platform launches, free and promising to connect creators with readers, and the people come. Work gets posted, communities form, and then slowly—or not—things start to shift. The algorithm changes, either in measured, subtle steps or all at once, and the visibility dries up. Corporate content starts taking over the feed, the terms get changed to benefit the platform over the artists.

It happened when Facebook came on the scene, routing out MySpace. Then with Instagram as it became another head of the Meta monster. It happened with Twitter, when the cheery blue bird was morphing into the corporate X. Now it's happening with webcomics, too, and has been for a while. The Webtoonification of everything, the gradual transformation of creator oriented platforms into content delivery systems, optimized for platform growth and profit rather than centering on the very people who helped build it.

Line Webtoon is the most visible example of enshittification coming to our specific corner of the internet, but they're far from the only ones. They gutted their Canvas creator rewards program, flooded the platform with Disney and Marvel, and solidified a two tiered system that leaves most creator owned properties in the cold. Tapas started out indie friendly too, back in its days as Tapastic, then attempted a rights grab in 2017 before selling out to a Korean corporate giant for a hefty 510 million in 2021, and immediately doing an about-face away from the community that made them even relevant. GlobalComix talked itself up as the indie alternative, then turned around and let Marvel, DC and Disney bury small creators beyond any real chance of discovery. The pattern repeats, and keeps repeating ad infinitum, as long as there are dollars to be had.

There's another pattern here worth noting, too. There was a time on the internet when dedicated creative spaces like Elfwood, early DeviantArt and the old webring ecosystems thrived, not because there were no alternatives but because the people were already there looking for art. Creators didn't have to chase attention, the audience built itself. Then social media came along, consolidating everything into the same feeds, and suddenly art was competing with outrage, cat videos (nothing against cat videos!! I could watch them all day) and sponsored posts for the same thirty seconds of everyone's scroll. The platforms that survived had choices: adapt or be left behind, and a lot of the ones who adapted stopped being real art spaces. They became just another content platform, or something even worse like the current DeviantArt. The audience didn't get better access to art, they just got more of everything and art got harder to find.

Webtoonification is that consolidation pressure arriving inside the webcomic space itself.

Webcomics were never supposed to be an industry. They were the xeroxed zines and hand-folded ashcans of the internet, a place where anyone with a story and the drive to tell it could find an audience without asking permission. That spirit didn't disappear when the platforms got bigger. But the platforms did keep growing and corporatizing, and somewhere in that growth, something insidious crept in: creative freedom got traded for visibility, and visibility got traded away for compliance. The moment a platform starts dictating your format, your content, your output schedule, optimizing you like any other piece of content, you aren't really an indie creator anymore. You're just an unpaid employee, making whatever your boss allows.

The good news is that they're not the whole picture, no matter how much they wish they were. Corporations are good at overshadowing things, but they're not as good at killing them off as they'd like! The alternatives didn't disappear. Some of them have been stubbornly, intrepidly doing their thing since the early 2000s, outlasting corporate acquisitions, server crashes, and the chaotically shifting landscape of the internet at large. Others are brand new, built by people who looked at the current landscape and said, "...Nah." I'm sure none of them, even my favorites, are perfect, but they are all damn well worth knowing about so you can make your own choices!

Direct Alternatives to Webtoon

Drunk Duck

Drunk Duck has been around since 2002 — one of the very first free webcomic hosting platforms, back when that was a genuinely new idea. It's had a bumpy ride since then, passing through corporate hands more than once, suffering catastrophic server crashes, and enduring a rather unpopular rebrand to "The Duck" that the community largely refused to accept. But when the last corporate owner lost interest and let it languish, the community bought it back. They fundraised, they negotiated and scrambled, and they've been running it themselves ever since. They fought for their platform and won. The annual Drunk Duck Awards are still going strong as of the writing of this piece, the scheduling tools are reliable and easy, and yes, you can customize the layout. I love it. I'll be there until the lights go out.

ComicFury

ComicFury launched in 2008 as one person's scrappy attempt to compete with the big webcomic hosts of the era — and somehow outlasted most of them. It's ad-free, funded entirely by its users through Patreon, and gives you complete control over your comic's HTML if you want it. If you don't, the default layout is clean enough that you may never feel the need to touch it. The community is small, engaged, and genuinely there for comics. It's not flashy. It doesn't need to be. Like the Duck, it's just been doing the damn thing the whole time everyone else was getting bought and sold, and I'll support that forever.

Domotown

Domotown is the newest addition to my regular rotation and honestly one of my favorites. It's an art platform first — think old DeviantArt before it lost its mind, crossed with a healthy dash of ComicFury and Substack — with genuinely excellent series and comic features built in. It's small, it's new, and the founder is personally invested in a way that's increasingly rare; he comments on creator pages, builds new features, and listens to the community. That kind of founder energy makes a big difference, especially early on, because the community that shows up first tends to set the tone for everything that follows. If you make comics and you care about being part of something that isn't already corporate, getting in now is worth your time.

Fables

Fables is built by the same team behind TopWebComics, which means it comes with decades of webcomic industry experience behind it rather than being someone's first rodeo. It's relatively new as a platform but it doesn't feel unfinished; the interface is smooth, the scheduling features are excellent, the tagging and discoverability are solid, and creators keep 100% of their ad revenue. The connection to TopWebComics also means there's already a reader base that knows and trusts the brand, which helps with the discoverability problem that plagues every new platform. There are ad perks available through the TWC connection that I haven't fully taken advantage of yet or even explored — entirely my own fault — but they're there when I get around to it.

Webcomic Studio

Webcomic Studio was built by Annie Sexton, a software engineer who makes comics herself. She wanted better platforms for indie webcomics, so she built one her fucking self, tyvm. You don't get more indie spirit than that. It's free, no hidden fees or upgrades, supports multiple formats, and has built-in AI scraper protection — your comic is yours and she's actively making sure it stays that way. I'm throwing my hat, and my comic, into her ring as soon as I have a few minutes to spare doing it.

ComCraft

ComCraft was built by comic fans who got tired of incredible stories never finding their audience because the industry didn't make room for them. So they made room. No follower minimums, no gatekeeping, a built-in shop feature, and a clean polished interface. It's exactly the kind of platform the current landscape needs more of. I get the feeling they're trying to launch a print shop as well, although I admittedly haven't looked too far into it, and I'm all for that. Even if their shop stops being entirely free for members who post their comic there, anything that's a fair outlet for merchandising that benefits the creator and helps keep the platform's lights on is a good idea in my book.

Worth Knowing About

NamiComi launched in 2022 with a mission statement that reads like a direct response to everything wrong with the current landscape — no exclusivity deals, no platform licensing your work out from under you, and creators in control of their own titles. Their about page explicitly calls out predatory publishing contracts and platforms that use self-published creators as a pipeline for their "Originals" while neglecting everyone else. It's worth reading just for that. The caveat is that the community skews heavily toward manga aesthetics, so if your work is Western traditional format (like mine) it may not find its people there as easily. Worth watching closely regardless, I'm not there but I'm considering it.

Inkstra is new, small, and the founder is active on Reddit and genuinely happy to answer questions, which is a huge plus to me when I'm trying to decide whether to invest time in a platform. It has an engagement-based revenue share model and is explicitly courting early adopters to help shape what it becomes. If that kind of ground floor energy appeals to you, it's worth a look. (In the end I decided it didn't suit me all that well, not because anything's wrong with it but because they lean more heavily toward monetization than I do. I genuinely want the main story of my comic to stay free, with bonus content and hi-res stuff as paid extras).

SpinWhiz has been around since 2011, which in webcomic platform years is practically respectable. As of early 2025 it went temporarily offline to relaunch as Spinwhiz 3.0. I don't know yet what that relaunch looks like, but a platform that's been around that long and is still fighting to exist is worth keeping an eye on. Watch this space.

Own Your Corner of the Internet

Everything on this list is worth your time, but there's a gold standard worth naming in terms of creative control: your own site, your own domain, your own archive that nobody can take away from you. Every platform on this list — even the best ones, even the ones run by people who genuinely care — is still somebody else's house. If it goes down, gets sold, or changes its terms, your comic goes with it unless you have a home base that's purely yours.

That doesn't mean you need to be a developer or spend a lot of money. WordPress makes building and maintaining a comic site easily accessible to non-technical creators, with themes and plugins designed specifically for webcomics. It's not perfect but it's well documented, widely supported, and gets you to "my comic has a real home" faster than most alternatives.

If you want to get started without committing to a full domain and hosting plan, Neocities is worth serious consideration. It's free, yes, a free website, and it's built around the idea of personal websites in the spirit of the old web. The community there is active, creative, and refreshingly supportive of indie creators. Yes, it's technically still someone else's platform — but the ethos is so far removed from the corporate model that it barely feels like a comparison. Think of it as training wheels that happen to also be a community that you might decide you want to stay in.

Once you have your own site, webrings are one of the best discoverability tools available — and they're having a revival right now. The basic idea is simple: a group of creators with similar comics link to each other, readers follow the ring and discover new work organically. No algorithm, no ad spend, just readers who already like the thing you make finding more of the thing they like. The Smallweb Subway operates a little differently than most, organizing multiple different kinds of sites into a "line" and slotting you into the proper stop along the way — and yes, there's a dedicated comics line. With your own site, there's also the good old fashioned link exchange, where you host a link to your friend's comic or just all the ones that you love, and somewhere, someone does the same for you!

None of these are the only way. A comic hosted entirely on ComicFury with a Neocities presence is just as legitimate as one with a custom domain and a WordPress install, or a hand coded site, or even one that's just hosted on some of the free webcomic hosts. The point isn't to hit some arbitrary benchmark of "real" creator status. The point is to own as much of your presence as you reasonably can, and to plug into communities that exist to help readers find you. And guess what? You don't even have to leave Webtoon or Tapas or wherever you're already posting to do ANY of this. You can do them in tandem and reach new audiences. It's a little extra work, yes, but maybe not as much as you think—I'll get into that in a minute. For now….

Social Media — Like It Or Not

And I don't, trust me. Here's the part nobody loves to hear, though: social media still matters. For small independent creators, it remains one of the most powerful advertising tools available, algorithm frustrations and all. The goal isn't to love it. The goal is to use it strategically and not let it eat you alive.

Tumblr gets its own mention here because it deserves one. I'm a fan — I love its chaos, its weird corners, its oddly specific fandoms that appear out of nowhere and adopt things wholesale. It has a solid history with webcomics that predates most of the platforms on this list, a tagging system that actually functions as a discovery tool, and a creator culture that feels more human than most. The algorithm exists and you'll wrestle with it, but it's not your enemy.

Bluesky has become one of the better places for creators right now. It's link-friendly — genuinely, actually link-friendly, which is rarer than it should be — and the webcomic and art community there is active and growing. Worth being on.

Instagram is complicated. The reach is still real, the audience is still there, but the platform has been fighting static image posts for years in favor of Reels and video content. It's not impossible, it's just more work for potentially less return than it used to be. Whether it's worth that work depends on your comic and your audience.

Threads is still a Meta product, which means it carries all the baggage that implies — but they've at least put a friendly face on it. It's more conversational than Instagram, less hostile to text and links, and there's a growing creative community there. The actual people there are lovely, and I enjoy the atmosphere enough that I overlook its place as one of the three heads of the Meta monster. Keep your expectations calibrated accordingly and it can be useful for spreading news and building casual visibility.

Facebook is ancient and everyone knows it, but it's not quite dead yet — particularly for community connections. Groups still function as genuine gathering places for niche audiences, and if your comic has a specific fandom overlap there's likely a community already there worth being part of. Monetizing through Facebook directly is basically a non-starter for small creators, but that's not really what it's for anymore. Think of it as a bulletin board rather than a potential storefront.

Mastodon and Pixelfed deserve a mention here not because they'll set your traffic on fire — they probably won't, at least not yet — but because they're worth supporting. Mastodon is the decentralized alternative to the Twitter/X model, Pixelfed is the same idea applied to image sharing. The audiences are smaller, the discovery is slower, but the ethos is anti-corporate in ways that should feel familiar if you've read this far. I want to see them grow. Competition is healthy on the web, for creators and consumers alike — monocultures benefit nobody except the monopoly.

Managing all of this across multiple platforms is where tools like Fedica and Buffer earn their keep. Batch scheduling your update posts means social media becomes a task you do once rather than a thing that interrupts your whole week. It's not glamorous advice, sure, but it's the truth. I make my comic-related update posts once a week most of the time, then interact with people individually on each platform as I get the chance.

Direct Support & Sales

None of the platforms in this section will find your audience for you. That's the brutal truth of it — these are tools for converting existing readers into supporters, not discovery engines. Being an indie creator will always mean being your own marketing team and advocate! The social media section comes first for a reason: first, you build the visibility, then you give people somewhere to send their money.

Patreon is the industry standard for a reason. Readers trust it, the membership tier system is flexible, and it's been around long enough that most people already have accounts. The fees are real and worth factoring in, but so is the trust factor — a reader who might think twice about handing their card details (understandably) to an unfamiliar site will often give them to Patreon without a second thought. Worth noting too that Patreon has been developing Quips, a social feature that lets you post short public updates to your community, not unlike Threads or X but without the corporate algorithm — which means it's quietly becoming a monetization platform and a community space simultaneously.

Substack is underutilized by comics creators and that's a shame because the newsletter format is genuinely well suited to serialized storytelling. Beyond the newsletter itself, Substack Notes functions as a social feed — short posts, replies, discovery through other writers' recommendations. Like Patreon's Quips it blurs the line between monetization platform and community space, and for the right creator that's a powerful combo!

Ko-fi is the one I'd point newer creators toward first. Lower fees than Patreon, a genuine indie-friendly reputation, shop and membership features that have grown considerably beyond the original tip jar model, and a community that skews toward exactly the kind of audience that likes indie comics and roots for the underdog. If the corporate feel of some platforms puts your readers off, Ko-fi tends not to.

Buy Me a Coffee operates in similar territory to Ko-fi — tip jar origins, grown into something more substantial, low friction for both creators and supporters. I know less about it personally than Ko-fi but it has a solid reputation and is worth knowing exists.

For selling your work directly — collected editions, mini comics, print files, extras — itch.io is the most creator-friendly option in the space. It's primarily known as an indie game platform but its comics section is active, the terms are genuinely excellent, and you set your own price including free. Think of it as the indie game store that also happens to be great for PDFs and CBZ files.

Gumroad covers similar ground and has a larger general audience, but it's had some platform drama in recent years worth looking into before you commit. I'll leave the research to you and let you make your own call.

Comix.one is the most ambitious of the three — positioning itself as a full end-to-end creator ecosystem with crowdfunding, digital sales, and a brand new print-on-demand partnership. It's newer and still growing but the model is interesting and the intent is clearly in the right place.

What I Do, and Why

If this all sounds like a lot to manage, I promise it's less overwhelming than it looks. I maintain my own website, all my social media, and multiple different free comic platforms; here's how I actually do it, just in case anyone finds it useful!

Every time I finish a page, I export it in four formats before I close the file: a high resolution version for paid Patreon supporters, a WebP for my main site, a downsized JPG for the free platforms, and a thumbnail for Tumblr that links back to my site. I also save a thumbnail image, a panel crop from some part of the page, to post on social media. This takes maybe five extra minutes at page completion and saves scrambling later. By the time posting day arrives the files are already sitting there waiting.

On posting day I open a saved tab group; one click, and every platform opens straight to the page I need. I take my author's comment for that page, copy it, and work through each tab in order: upload the files, paste the comment, set the schedule. Then I go to Fedica to batch schedule whatever social media update I'm posting that day. Buffer is a solid alternative if Fedica isn't your thing for whatever reason, and there might be alternatives I don't know about! But Fedica works well for me.

That's it. Start to finish, an hour at most once you're familiar with each platform's format. It's not magic, it's just a workflow, and workflows are what can keep you making comics instead of drowning in admin hell.

The Part That Matters the Most

The internet is big. Bigger than any one platform or algorithm, bigger than any corporation's ability to contain it. The alternatives are there! Some of them have been there for twenty years, fighting the good fight while everyone else was busy scrabbling for coins. Some of them were built last year by people who got fed up and decided to do something about it. All of them need creators willing to show up.

As for what I make and where I make it — I write whatever story I please, within the laws of my country. If people want to read it, that puts me over the moon, especially if they leave a comment. If they don't, though, that's okay too! There are so many incredible stories out there. People should read what inspires them, whatever makes them laugh, cry or feel. Whatever gets them through the day and leaves them feeling satisfied. That's what storytelling's all about, not metrics, algorithms or money. Not optimizing output to benefit a corporation that doesn't even know you exist.

What is KNIFEBEETLE? It's a curated list of webcomics, linked to by each of its members to promote each other and help readers find new stories to read and fall in love with. If your application is successful, you get added to the list on the hub site!

The criteria to be considered are:

Polished, interesting, well-written stories with a narrative focus.

At least 30 pages of comic must be available to read.

Regular updates OR completely finished.

You must be able to link back to KNIFEBEETLE on your comic's site in some way. This last point means that comics that are ONLY hosted on sites like Webtoon and Tapas cannot be considered for membership. Hosts like ComicFury are fine, Tumblr may be considered.

Membership is not exclusive, so you can still join other webrings and collectives.

This year there are TWO kinds of memberships to apply for:

FULL MEMBER: Include the widget on every page of your site.

AFFILIATE: Simply link back to KNIFEBEETLE in some way on your site. Check the website to see how these two memberships work in action.

If you previously applied but didn't get in, you are welcome to apply again!

I am planning to cap new members at 20 but will see how many applications I get. You are more likely to be accepted if you're submitting to a genre that doesn't have a lot of other comics in it.

The deadline is October 31st, but I will still need to go through all the applications and it might take me a while because I need to read each comic. All applicants will hear back from me by the end of the year.