New? Just want to read some damn Homestuck without 10 years of drama getting crammed down your gullet? Don’t worry, Homestuck is far from being lost media. Here's a quick guide.

BROWSER

Homestuck.com doesn't work. Hasn't worked in months. Its up now, but the images are broken. You can't use it.

There are two primary mirrors (copies) of the website:

https://mspa.chadthundercock.com/ is the recommended mirror. Notably it offers formats for both mobile and desktop devices, and a few other bonus features on its options page. If you want to read Homestuck on your phone, this is basically your only real option.

https://homestuck.kici.moe/ is another mirror. It has less features than chadthundercock. Most notably it lacks the bonus features and mobile formatting of chadthundercock. Several pages are also known to not work properly. Regardless, its a perfectly serviceable alternative.

While these offers an experience similar to reading on homestuck.com, reading Homestuck on browser isn't the preferred experience. Also its likely to get taken down eventually.

COLLECTION

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is the best way to view Homestuck and all of its related works, without a doubt. Good motherfucking news, you can get to downloading the client and the accompanying asset pack right now. You must download *both* of these for the application to work.

WINDOWS CLIENT DOWNLOAD

MAC CLIENT DOWNLOAD

LINUX/STEAMDECK FLATPAK PAGE

ASSET PACK DOWNLOAD

For the full list of client downloads, check out the UHC's github page.

You can find additional mirrors for the archive and the client on this blog.

The files is contained within a file type known as ".zip", as indicated by the folder icon having a zipper on it. This is unusable. On Mac, this will automatically unzip by attempting to open it. On windows, you must right click zip files and select the "extract all" option that should appear. These may be unzipped anywhere.

After unzipping the client, the application may be started by opening the folder that should appear and double clicking on the application with the MSPA logo.

After opening the client for the first time, it should automatically detect the unzipped asset pack. If it doesn't, you might have to do it manually.

If you're opening the client for the first time on windows, you may see this screen:

Don't worry, the UHC isn't a virus. Just click the "More info" button circled in green and then click the "Run anyway" button that should appear.

For those of you on Mac, you may need to change or override your security settings to open an unverified app, like the UHC client. Here is an apple support article on how to do so.

If you're still confused, here's a video installation tutorial.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me or the official UHC support discord here.

(This post is an expanded/revised version of a comment I already made in Gio's thread here.)

So Gio's recent post on the fate of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection (which you should absolutely still read if you have time) is like, novella-length and it's clear that most of the people talking about it have not read it. Misconceptions about the post are circulating widely both in this community and across the internet. I wanted to create a resource to address some of the most common bad takes and also summarize the post for those who want to know more but don't have time to read up on it themselves. Note that I couldn't possibly account for people's different levels of knowledge or context for this stuff going in, so while I've tried to include a lot of that, if you're reading any part of this and are still confused, feel free to ask in the comments and I'm happy to clarify.

By the way, this post is still extremely long (though Gio's post is literally 10 times longer, so I think I've still done a good job condensing). To make the post more skimming-friendly and to help people follow without their eyes glazing over, I've made ample use of bold.

Common Misconceptions/False Narratives About the Post

1. This does not represent the end of Homestuck being available to read. To interpret this as "Homestuck is becoming lost media" or "Andrew Hussie is trying to keep people from reading Homestuck" is simply incorrect. The HICU's/Homestuck, Inc.'s fork of the UHC is still available, as is Gio's github repository of his version, which will work with the asset pack currently being distributed by the HICU. The problem is that the UHC as a fan-driven archival project is ending and any further maintenance of it will be done by official Homestuck-affiliated sources. See this post as to why that might still be something you want to be concerned about even though Homestuck will remain readable (TL;DR: putting Andrew Hussie in charge of the UHC invites him to give Homestuck the "George Lucas has decided Greedo shot first" treatment, and otherwise suppress any aspects of his body of work that he doesn't like anymore).

2. This does not indicate that Homestuck: Beyond Canon is secretly being written by Andrew Hussie. It does indicate that the HICU is more under the thumb of Hussie than they previously presented themselves to be, and that Hussie may hold a significant amount of power through legal means and/or social pressure to influence the direction of Beyond Canon if he wishes to, but there's absolutely no evidence from anything Gio's presenting that that has ever happened, and Gio does not even appear to be trying to obliquely suggest that he suspects that has happened. That's just not what this is about.

3. There is no reason to believe that the Discord logs presented by Gio are fake. The Discord logs Gio shows in the post are not actual screenshots, but text in an HTML element meant to resemble the Discord UI. Many people have caught onto this and spread around the idea that this proves Gio faked these logs. This is not the case. Presenting them in this format makes them more accessible for people who need to resize the text or use a screen reader, and as we will discuss in the summary, Gio lost access to some or all of the logs during these events and has copy-pasted text transcripts but not screenshots. Miles, the person who Gio is talking to in most of these logs, has issued a statement responding to Gio's post where he does not even attempt to argue that the logs are faked, which would have been a slam dunk way to dispute Gio's claims if it was true, so his failure to do so can be taken as strong evidence the logs are real.

4. Gio is not "just mad he was told to stop illegally distributing Andrew Hussie's IP." Some people who haven't read the post like to claim that it was totally reasonable of Andrew Hussie to ask someone to take down their illegal distribution of his IP. This is true (or at least it would be if Hussie hadn't spent years advertising the UHC on his Linktree before this all started, proving he was both aware of it and not concerned about any threat it posted to his IP), but not at all what Gio is complaining about. He acknowledges that he never had any legal right to distribute the contents of Homestuck and says he always knew he would have to take it down if asked. In fact, he did take it down as soon as he was asked to, without complaint. The problem is everything that happens before and after that. Read on.

5. Regarding claims that Gio is transphobic/antisemitic: If you've been told this, you've been told a biased narrative, probably by someone who wanted to poison the well against Gio before you even knew what he was claiming. In an earlier version of the post, Gio used he/him pronouns for Andrew Hussie and referred to him with certain gendered terms. Hussie uses any/all pronouns and his own friends can be seen referring to him with he/him pronouns throughout Gio's discord logs (and in the statement from Miles inked above), so that is clearly not an issue and I will be doing it as well throughout this post. As far as referring to Hussie as a "man", etc., Gio was unaware this was inaccurate and apologized and made appropriate corrections. He also had a subheading labeled "The Gio-ish Question" in an earlier version of the post which has been interpreted as an antisemitic dogwhistle. He revised the post to alter this and explained that this was an inelegant way of trying to express his having felt dehumanized by Andrew Hussie through the events described in the post. Tragically, this makes him the first person ever in the history of the Internet to make an unfair comparison of someone he doesn't like to the Nazis, for which he must be burned at the stake. /s, obviously. This is a nothingburger being used to poison the well, as I said.

6. Regarding claims that Gio is a long-time anti-Homestuck shit-stirrer: I imagine this drama is getting a lot more exposure than the previous Gio-related drama from 4-5 years ago, especially since it's come at a time that there's a sudden influx of new or returning Homestuck fans after the announcement of a possible animated series and at a time that the UHC is practically the only way to get the intended Homestuck reading experience. That has allowed unfair claims to spread about Gio's past in the Homestuck fandom. For context, in 2020 he wrote an article on his blog detailing everything that was publicly known about the troubled development process of Hiveswap, followed shortly after by another reporting new claims from a credible source. A few months later, Youtuber Sarah Z posted a video retrospective on the Homestuck fandom which briefly covered Gio's reports, drawing a much larger audience to his previously little-known claims. This prompted legal action against Sarah Z by What Pumpkin, which she detailed in a second video and which Gio wrote another blog post covering. You can form your own opinion about Gio based on this, but it's worth pointing out that his reporting and Sarah Z's video are the only thing that ever got What Pumpkin to provide any bit of transparency into the problems with Hiveswap's development (a Kickstarter game that fans contributed over $2 million to and which still has yet to be completed 13 years later), and what they revealed at that time basically just confirmed Gio's reporting correct.

Very Long Summary

As follows is a big long summary of Gio's post. If this is still too long for you to read, feel free to scroll past to the next section where I break down the key takeaways in terms of the actual alleged wrongdoings of Hussie, Homestuck, Inc., and the Homestuck Independent Creative Union (HICU).

• In October 2023, Bambosh and Gio (the co-creators of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection) get a casual email from Miles (HICU member and current co-director of Homestuck: Beyond Canon, though this is before those things existed) expressing interest in a collaboration between Hussie and the UHC. Miles will later reveal that by this point, Hussie already had his lawyer ready to go with a cease and desist order to take down the UHC, but apparently decided to try this softer approach first and reserve the C&D as a threat if needed.
• Miles initially takes a very innocent, casual tone, claiming that there will be no "scary legal bullshit" or "weird or punitive" behavior. He even acts confused when Gio expresses concerns about Hussie's opinion of him after his blog posts, and reassures him that this history is not going to be an issue.
• Miles lays out how things are going to go: Bambosh and Gio will each be given an NDA to sign, followed by a one-on-one "interview" with Hussie, and then negotiations can begin. Miles says Bambosh will go first, and then pretty much immediately after, Gio will go through the same process. After settling some initial concerns about the NDA's scope, Bambosh signs an NDA.
• Gio is not given an NDA to sign. There is no communication about the cause of this hold-up. Eventually Miles says that Bambosh is being asked to sign a license agreement which will govern the way he and Gio are allowed to maintain the UHC going forward. Gio and Bambosh both express that as co-owners of the UHC, neither of them can make a decision like that without the other's input, but Gio isn't allowed to read the license agreement because he hasn't been given an NDA to sign yet.
• This is the status quo for most of a year, as Miles and Hussie fail to produce an NDA for Gio to sign, fail to explain why this is happening, and feign confusion as to why Gio can't just agree to have Bambosh sign a legally-binding document that affects both of them but which Gio is not allowed to see or talk to him about.
• During this time, Miles and Hussie begin to threaten legal action. Miles accuses Gio and Bambosh of stalling and "trying to pull Gio into talks before we were comfortable". He now reveals that he and Hussie never actually intended to work with Gio unless he agreed to "own up to" his past harmful behavior (i.e., his blog posts).
• Bambosh and Gio stick to their guns. Eventually, Hussie goes ahead and tells Bambosh either he's signing the license today or a C&D will be issued. Bambosh responds by resigning from the UHC, leaving it solely in Gio's hands.
• The same day, Miles reaches out to Gio, suddenly no longer accusatory and taking a very conciliatory tone. He says that Hussie still doesn't want the UHC to go down (despite the C&D that has already been set in motion). Gio says he's still amenable to working together if there will be no further legal threats and Miles apparently gets Hussie to cancel the C&D.
• Miles promises that they will finally get Gio an NDA and then the highest priority is to give Gio a licensing agreement to review, although there's some waffling about "terms" that will need to be negotiated.
• Gio finally gets an NDA to sign and signs it (he didn't violate it by making this post, because none of the work that the NDA would have covered ended up actually happening). After this, Miles reveals that those "terms" earlier were actually that Hussie expects Gio to retract or rewrite his blog posts from 2020-2021. He also says that if Hussie doesn't like how things proceed from here, he will not only have the UHC taken down, but will also sue Gio.
• Miles provides Gio with a PDF written by Hussie, meant to express the damages he feels Gio's posts have done. Gio doesn't go into this in detail but describes it as "sophistry" and mentions a few obviously unreasonable claims Hussie makes. It's worth noting about this, re: the "Gio is transphobic" narrative in some corners of the fandom, that Hussie apparently consistently uses Gio's legal name rather than his chosen name throughout the document, something he notably does not do for Bambosh.
• Gio's response after talking to a lawyer is essentially, "I have had a standing request for any of you to make corrections or comments on those posts since before they were even posted, and I'll gladly make any corrections to anything I got wrong, but I'm not signing anything that will force me to remove or rewrite parts of my posts just because you don't like them." Miles seems to express that this is reasonable and indicates they'll be dropping the issue.
• A few weeks later, Miles (or potentially someone else in control of the HICU Discord account, since all of this is happening in an official HICU Discord server) archives the channel where these discussions have been taking place, causing Gio to lose access to the logs of what has happened so far. Gio points out that this could legally be considered evidence tampering, but he has already backed up those chat logs in any case.
• During talks at this stage, Gio alludes to the idea of the UCH being taken down and how if he has to explain to the fandom why that happened, that would be a mutual worst-case scenario that both parties should both want to avoid. Hussie apparently takes this as a veiled threat of blackmail, and Miles says that in order to restore trust, Gio needs to place the UHC into the stewardship of a HICU member immediately. You may notice this request is kind of like if you were trying to negotiate an agreement with someone to let them use your car, and then you say, "You mentioned that our mutual worst-case scenario is me crashing your car. Since you said that, I've been concerned you're going to cut the brake lines to spite me if negotiations break down, so before we go any further, I'm going to need you to transfer ownership of the car to my friend."
• Gio refuses. There are some more tense conversations with Miles after this but it seems this is pretty much the end of any pretense of an amicable attempt at collaboration.
• The HICU member Gio was supposed to transfer the UHC to just goes ahead and creates a fork of the UHC. This is framed to the public as a HICU fork of the UHC for archival purposes, though this fork is posted on an official Homestuck github account and later (after Gio makes this blog post) it will be clarified to actually be run by Homestuck, Inc., not the HICU, even though it was created by a HICU member.
• Gio sees this as more or less an okay solution, since this fork is operating within the UHC license. Because the last he heard was that taking down the UHC would be perceived as a threat, and no one bothers to contact him through all of this, he continues hosting the UHC on his website.
• Hussie's lawyer hits Gio with a DMCA takedown request over the UHC. Gio immediately complies, removing the asset pack, which is the only thing that can be reasonably construed as copyright infringement. He continues hosting the browser itself, since that's his (and Bambosh's) own original work and doesn't contain anything copyrighted.
• He soon receives another DMCA takedown request. His lawyer is like "I'm pretty sure Gio already took down all the infringing material." Hussie's lawyer claims that Gio needs to take down the whole UHC site, since its use of the word "Homestuck", to describe the comic Homestuck, is a trademark infringement (note: not how trademark law works).
• Gio's lawyer responds basically saying "We don't agree that anything that was left on the website infringed upon your IP, but as a show of good faith we'll take the website down entirely while we hash this out." This happens, and now that Hussie has gotten what he wanted, he ghosts Gio and his lawyer entirely for months.
• During this time, Gio claims, he is about to release a Steam game that he collaborated on with other Homestuck fan creators when his collaborators suddenly pull out, explaining that Homestuck threatened legal action against them if they continued associating with Gio. This apparently kills the game and ends some of Gio's friendships.
• After months of being ghosted by Hussie's lawyer, Gio's lawyer informs them that their lack of response is being taken as them dropping the issue. Gio reinstates the material he and his lawyer do not believe is infringing.
• Hussie's lawyer finally gets back to them, offering a "settlement" with 3 conditions: 1) Gio has to take down the offending blog posts, which they claim are libelous, 2) Gio has to take down any copyrighted assets on his website (though inexplicably, they say they're fine with him hosting the reader, which is all that Gio is actually hosting anymore), and 3) Gio has to sign an NDA basically agreeing not to say anything mean about Hussie on his blog about this.
• Gio's lawyer is like, "I'm not sure what you even think still needs to be settled at this point. You've acknowledged that the reader itself is fine to host and Gio is no longer distributing the asset pack. Hussie has acknowledged in the past [in communications to Sarah Z that she made public] that nothing in Gio's blog posts is actually false. Gio is still interested in working with you if you wanted to actually work out a license with him to use his work commercially, but it seems like you are only interested in that if he satisfies your grudge against him and gives you full control, which is not going to happen."
• Hussie's lawyer says that the reader's name containing the word "Homestuck" constitutes trademark infringement, so the entire website needs to be taken down (though this logic should also apply to the github repository, they for some reason do not try to argue this needs to be taken down). Meanwhile, they're walking back on calling the blog posts libelous, now saying that the possibility that they might be is "under review". They give Gio a final ultimatum: either he settles like they asked (including taking down the posts), or he gets mega sued. The lawyer specifically says they will be going after Gio for money based on the supposed damages caused by his hosting of the asset pack for years (unclear what possible damages were taking place during the years when Hussie was straight up publicly endorsing and advertising the UHC without issue). They hilariously dismiss the idea of Gio making another blog post about all this with "We are not concerned about the court of public opinion."
• Gio goes ahead and takes down the UHC website again and makes his blog post.

The Highlights

The TL;DR of the TL;DR. Still really long. This is just a digestion of the key allegations Gio is making against Hussie and Miles, if you only care about exactly what they supposedly did wrong.

• First and foremost, throughout the entire process, no separation is made between the interests of Hussie and the interests of the HICU, revealing the HICU is far less independent from Hussie than it has presented itself to the public.
• Despite initially reaching out through Miles as an intermediary in a friendly, disarming manner that framed the request to collaborate as totally optional and with the utmost respect for the UHC's autonomy, Hussie and co. had already readied a cease and desist order to legally threaten the project. Simultaneously with this, they claim that the UHC going down (and the resulting fan outcry, which has now come to pass) is such a worst-case scenario for them that they consider Gio simply alluding to it as his own worst-case scenario to be unto blackmail. The implication is that they never really intended their C&D to take down the UHC, but only to legally strongarm Bambosh and Gio into doing what they wanted.
• Miles goes back on commitments repeatedly, most notably on his initial insistence that there would be no expectation to hash out old beef related to Gio's blog posts and his claim that Gio would be given an NDA to sign more or less immediately after Bambosh. It's impossible to say whether this is because Miles was maliciously lying when he made those commitments, because Hussie was lying to Miles which led Miles to make good faith commitments that he couldn't actually keep, or because of good faith miscommunications between Miles and Hussie. It's a bad look no matter how you slice it, where the best-case scenario is Hussie acting irresponsibly, and the worst-case scenario is what Gio alleges, that this was a coordinated psychological manipulation tactic to get Gio and Bambosh to let their guard down before pulling out the rug from under them.
• Miles and Hussie both refuse to respect that Gio and Bambosh are a team who make decisions together, framing the situation as them "stalling" or pushing their boundaries to involve Gio "before we're comfortable", simply because Gio wants to be allowed to read a legally binding licensing agreement affecting the future of their shared project before his partner signs it. As Gio alleges, it looks very much like this was an attempt to "divide and conquer" and lock Gio out of the process by getting Bambosh under NDA and then pressuring him to give them everything they wanted while being legally barred from consulting his partner for advice.
• Hussie uses escalating legal threats to attempt to intimidate Gio into taking down his blog posts, despite being unable to point to any actual untruths in any of the posts. The UHC licensing conversation is used as a bargaining chip in these negotiations despite the fact that the posts are entirely unrelated and Hussie had years of opportunity to attempt to resolve any issue he had with them beforehand.
• Miles (likely as instructed by Hussie) absurdly tries to convince Gio to just hand over the UHC to another HICU team member, acting like this will be the starting point of further negotiations, when obviously at that point they would have everything they want and have no further reason to interact with Gio, unless it was to strongarm him into taking down those blog posts.
• The HICU creates a fork of the UHC, implying to the public that this was done with Bambosh's and Gio's knowledge and consent, when it was not, and then try to use legal intimidation to have Gio take down the UHC from his website, in what appears to be an attempt to create the fandom perception that Gio and Bambosh willingly turned over management of the UHC to the HICU.
• Maybe the most serious accusation, which I should note is accompanied by the least evidence--Gio claims that Homestuck sabotaged an unrelated Steam game he was working on by threatening legal action against his friends for associating with him (presumably on the basis that his friends were Homestuck fan creators with fanworks vulnerable to legal targeting by Hussie as the Homestuck IP holder).
• Hussie's lawyer makes shifting and highly dubious legal claims about what is considered to be infringement of the Homestuck IP and about Gio's blog posts being libelous, ultimately threatening to sue Gio for financial damages supposedly incurred to the Homestuck brand by his hosting of the Homestuck assets during years that Hussie himself had not only publicly endorsed the UHC but even advertised it on his Linktree.

TL;DR of the TL;DR of the TL;DR

For those who really don't like reading, an ultra-condensed version (99.8% shorter than the original post). This is about as short as I can make it:

Andrew Hussie, through HICU member Miles, approached the UHC creators Gio and Bambosh pretending to be interested in a collaboration. In reality, he had no intent of working with Gio unless he retracted blog posts he had made critical of Andrew Hussie years earlier. Through deception and intimidation, he ran Bambosh out of the fandom, and after negotiations broke down, he took control of the project against the will of its creators and is now threatening a frivolous lawsuit against Gio.

EDIT: Made a small change to a bullet point in the summary after a correction from Gio.