I’ve gotten a few variations of this question, so I wanted to get some thoughts down.

The UHC is, itself, unofficial, in that it isn’t acting with the authority of the Homestuck brand, and it’s not a What Pumpkin published work.

https://homestuck.giovanh.com is one further layer more unofficial than that: It’s still not endorsed by Homestuck, but it’s also not necessarily “endorsed” by the main UHC project. It’s a separate spin-off for a couple of reasons, including the fact that it uses some non-free code. But ultimately this separation lets me test experimental features and ideas before they’re released as part of the main collection.

At https://homestuck.giovanh.com/gio, I’ve written

This is an online port of The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, a desktop collection of Homestuck and its related works. TUHC is developed by Bambosh and Gio (and some other great folks), while this port in particular is written, maintained, and hosted as an experiment by Gio.

This is meant as a way to use the offline homestuck collection in a browser, for people on mobile or platforms that don’t have a proper version, or as an “on-ramp” if you’re just getting into Homestuck and aren’t sure if you want to commit yet.

Don’t just use this to read Homestuck! Get the collection; it’s faster, it has real flash, and it costs less to host!

I still think this is the right mentality: if you’re reading through Homestuck or doing fan work, you probably still want the main desktop release. It’s also much more moddable; the browser version has some modding functionality, but it’s stripped down and isn’t ever going to be up to the standard of the main collection.

I think what this question might mean to be asking is: “is https://homestuck.giovanh.com temporary?” The answer to that is no: I don’t have any plans to stop hosting it, and if we ever move to a different URL, I’ll set something up to redirect https://homestuck.giovanh.com there, including the page references, so links won’t break. You should be able to safely share links to the web collection, including homestuck pages (https://homestuck.giovanh.com/mspa/001901) and collection metapages (https://homestuck.giovanh.com/search/fiddlesticks) (as possible).

I don’t currently have any plans to move the domain name, though. I can imagine doing that at some point in the future, if governance ever changes (i.e. it’s not strictly personal, and so shouldn’t be on my personal) but I already own giovanh.com, and I think Homestuck fits nicely there.

Related Reading§

• Saving Homestuck [SAHCon 2023 Panel]

This is a big question, so that gives me an opportunity to be self-indulgent. Here are a few things that come to me.

One major part of the answer is serious dissatisfaction with how current social media handles persistent information, but I have a whole article I’m planning to write on that topic.

I’ll talk about Hiveswap first because it’s kind of a special case. My intent when I started writing was actually completely different than what I ended up doing. I had been talking with some relatively new Homestuck fans and realized that there was an enormous amount information I just picked up from cultural osmosis that they just didn’t know. What’s more, most of the original sources for that information (peoples’ blogs, the forums, newsposts) were all out of use, shut down, or intentionally obfuscated.

So my original idea was to dump the whole Hiveswap story as I knew it (because I was there at the time, and actively engaged with the news and development information throughout) down on paper, attach archived versions of the original sources where possible, and fill in all the holes in my recollection while I was at it. Just because I thought it was interesting, and significant, and something people in the Homestuck fandom just ought to know. I… I might have even called it a calling? Not at all a “I’ve got to blow the lid on this whole scandal” calling, because at the time I didn’t know there was a whole scandal. I just realized I was one of only a few people equipped with the information needed to actually save that history.

Now, obviously Hiveswap in particular snowballed from there, as I put things together and realized I had stumbled on something important.

But it’s usually not just “I feel like I know some facts”, it’s usually that I make some interesting connections or observations that I want to point out. YouTube broke links and other life lessons and Twitter Blue is a late-stage symptom are very basic examples of this, where I try to link some real thing going on in the world with the concepts I’m reminded of when I hear about them, but that other people might not be. The same is sort of true of The Sarah Z Video Fallout, where I feel like I have a particular understanding of the story that lets me contextualize the new developments in a way other people might not naturally do. A lot of times, when some tech company is doing something something bad and sneaky, they rely on people not being able to properly contextualize it, which is how they get away with things. So it’s good to contextualize things, and even better if I teach somebody how to contextualize things in the process.

There’s also a strong memex element, where I use articles to organize and connect my own thoughts, and especially connect my thoughts about issues to other writing or videos or papers people have written. Whenever I see something that just strikes me as particularly good or important or poignant, and relates to a topic I’m personally interested in or have a particular take on, I’ll either staple it somewhere near where I’ve written about that topic before or toss in a folder to connect to an article later.

I have this sort of katamari method of writing, where every time I have a thought that seems particularly interesting, or related to a topic I have interesting thoughts about, I’ll write it down and categorize it somewhere until eventually my internal notes reach critical mass and there’s enough there to expand on and write into a real article.

And, on that note, I have a bigger answer to “why write things down” in a draft right now that will continue collecting thoughts passively until it’s ready, and then until it hits the top of my list. So, look out for that some day.