This whole situation is very confusing... I'm trying to let it boil over until I make an actual opinion on this, to make sure that I don't accidentally get roped up in some chronically online argument. No offense to anyone here, I just have very limited time at the moment.

My current takeaway from this situation with my limited knowledge and only really secondary sources is that Gio's word can't exactly be taken as truth (especially with some pretty bigoted comments and behaviour), and there's a probably lot of fighting over the preservation of Homestuck. I do know that both the Gio and HICU versions of the collection are still avaliable at the time. I did make an archive both on my computer and the Wayback Machine a bit ago, so it isn't the original version of the article, in case it goes down for whatever reason. Hopefully this situation calms down soon enough so that everyone's heads aren't being exploded at the same time.