@Margot

I think "before HICU or FRAF were a thing, people were already profiting from their Homestuck fanworks without great issue" would be a pretty big point of contention between you and Gio, then. In his blogpost he mentions a game he was involved with other HS creators on basically going up in smoke right before its Steam release simply due to how Homestuck responded to his involvement, and he also mentions a few other "publicly announced threats of legal action by Homestuck against fan projects".

I am unfortunately coming at all this stuff long after the fact and my information may be incomplete, so I apologize if I get anything wrong.

Going through them in order, the old Pesterchum client. The current one is maintained money-free as far as I can tell. This one had a kickstarter, which went down due to using someone else's IP:

"Unfortunately, due to a request by What Pumpkin regarding trademarks, I've chosen to take the project down."

So yeah, that is a Homestuck fanwork being given what sounds like a C&D over the IP's usage being monetized. It would later rebrand as Open Source Fandom Chat and make double its goal anyway. Then the money was all refunded, the creator went back to (presumably a moneyless version of) Pesterchum and it dropped support in 2021. No clue what happened there.

The second one certainly looks like the least-justified. It was a deviantart tutorial for making your own scalemate plushies, and in the creator's own words:
"I was ordered by Andrew to take the tutorial down".

So that's a non-monetized fanwork (as far as I can tell) being taken down, and this was 2011, so probably before Homestuck sold any of their own, right? If so, that one probably hurts the most, since it sure looks like they took down a fan creator's totally-free tutorial just so they could sell the end result(I presume the official scalemate plushies were not literally just made with this tutorial, though). It's still online on other websites. But yeah, dick move if so. A real "Samus Returns", that one.

Then he links to readMSPA's downloadable archive. Or well, he links to a dead MPSA Forums thread, which readMSPA itself quotes in reference to the limited distribution of its own offline archive (I have heard on at least two accounts that this archive served as the basis for the asset pack Bambosh made for the UHC, though I have no way of verifying this).

It reads:
"We can turn a blind eye to very minor distribution of such an archive, since in cases like [this] it's really more like advertising, but any sort of publicly available downloadable archive would definitely fall outside fair use laws."

So that is sort of a legal threat toward a rehost of the comic (it seems there used to be an online reupload available? this all comes from a time when my immersion in Homestuck was a lot shallower), which I think means that you could justifiably call other reuploads (in my head I've just been calling them Kici and Chad, which I think is cute) endangered. I think it would not be surprising to see them get an informal takedown request once the official site is back up, though hopefully Hussie has learned not to poke the bear on this one.

He also mentioned Homestrife, the fighting game. I don't know whether I'm misreading or he is, but his link directly highlights the part that says "due to various reasons(one of which was not being shutdown/C&D’d), as of September 2014, this project was put on permanant hiatus". Sooo what does that mean? It looks to me like it's saying they shut down, but it wasn't because of any legal threat. Is perhaps Gio reading this as "we got a C&D, but we're shutting down for some other reason"? A quick google search lead me to makin linking a backup of a blog post where they say WP declined a partnership with them, leading the game to cease development due to the expense, and I quote from one of the comments,

"They told us that they simply don’t allow crowdfunded projects for anything Homestuck related".

So. I guess you can call that a threat. As in, them saying it's not allowed carries the implication that you'd be in legal trouble if you did it anyway.

Finally, a recent tweet mentioned The Overseer Project, which is...fine? I'm just googling shit here so obviously if there's old drama I'm missing everyone is free to chime in, but V2 is still actively updated, like "github updated last week" territory. I do see that it's V2, and I saw one reddit comment saying "I think it got C&D'd" with no source, but in lieu of anything like Pesterchum where it was revived by someone else, it still has a patreon page for donations.

So what do we make of all this? I presume these were among the most damning examples Gio had (that he could talk about publicly at least), and what they ultimately amount to is two instances of Homestuck not wanting fan creators to monetize their IP, one informal agreement to not touch readMSPA if it isn't throwing entire copies around willy-nilly, and one takedown of something seemingly totally-innocent in hopes to monopolize the same idea for money. And within all that, there's still multiple versions of pesterchum online (albeit not the original, but I'm not sure what happened with that kickstarter or why the dev shelved his legally-safe client), there are still multiple site rehosts online (for now, we'll see) including readMSPA's if you ask real nicely, the overseer project doesn't seem to have gone anywhere (???) and Homestrife and the Scalemate thing (if you know where to look) are both still available, even if I think Homestuck was wrong to leave them out to dry over money they didn't need.

Does this make it wrong to say fanworks were never in danger? Yes, I would say so. Even if you think this is all small-potatoes, the fact that they had to be preserved in the way they were was not a case of Homestuck influencing them positively, simply being slightly more-lenient when the things they either took down or allowed to rot away were made available again.

Does this mean it's wrong to say current fanworks aren't in danger? I don't know. Certainly if Gio's story about the game he worked on is true, that's absolutely fucked. It's another way they've been terrible to this one guy with others he worked with as collateral damage. Do fanworks this one guy isn't involved with have anything to fear?...who knows! But I certainly wouldn't want to be part of a fandom where people who can work on your fan projects are secretly copyright-hazards the rights holders will go scorched-earth on regardless of how the people around him are involved or what they know. I think with almost all of these cases, I don't see any scenario in which Homestuck doing literally nothing is not beneficial to both them and everyone else. Are the results as destructive and predatory as Gio makes them sound (and, conversely, what may legitimately have happened to him, Bambosh and the youtube people)? Maybe not, but that doesn't make the end product good.

All of this gives me more anxiety about the alleged official response from Hussie. I hope that thing gets massaged to hell and back by everyone he works with until it's basically just a pledge to not fuck anyone over. They're not gonna get anything good out of mentioning Gio, Bambosh or Sarah Z again unless it's an apology, and I've seen them apologize for like three things ever.