Any talk by carnists about how "Well, if only you weren't so rude" is a smokescreen. Merely describing our views is met with thought-terminating cliches and accusations of wrecking, both of which get much more highly upvoted than our own comments.
Even if (as a lot of users have been claiming) the recent vegan posts were the result of wreckers, the response by the majority of the userbase has been so much more alienating than those original posts could be. The events of a year and a half ago are a lot less important to me than what I'm seeing today.
And what I'm seeing today is that Hexbear is about as vegan-friendly of a site as Reddit is: the movement is siloed within its own comm, has to regularly community ban people who wander in to snipe at it, and is met with extreme hostility anytime it ventures out into the main site.
I won't make such comparisons because I'm not a Holocaust survivor, nor am I a descendant of chattel slaves. But I'm afraid I have a hard time believing this because the hostility I encounter here on Hexbear is the exact sort of hostility to veganism I encounter everywhere outside of dedicated vegan spaces. No matter where it's done, no matter how it's done, arguing in favor of veganism in any way is met with anger, offense, or dismissal. I have seen this time and time again in countless different places. Phrasing, word choice, the arguments used, none of that matters. The only common factor is vegan advocacy.