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 appreciate you recognizing the moral issues with eating animal products, that's usually the first step toward making more conscious choices. Is there anything specifically holding you back from going vegan?
I'll just say that there isn't necessarily an inherently right way to go vegan, some people go cold turkey and cut out all animal products, but that doesn't necessarily work for everyone. For me personally, I cut out all dairy and egg products when I went vegan right away, but that's because I was already vegetarian for 12 years, so the transition wasn't as drastic for me. There are more gradual approaches too, like taking your least favorite dairy or animal products, and cutting that out/finding a plant-based substitute, seeing how that goes, and if it goes well, then continuing cutting out additional things until you work your way to full-on veganism. And, this is just my personal experience, but the idea of initially going vegan for me was very daunting, and I feel shitty to say that I did put it off for several months, even when I knew I could be better, until I couldn't contain my cognitive dissonance any longer and decided to make the change, and, well, it ended up being a lot easier than I expected, tbh.
Of course I would prefer everyone to be fully vegan right away, but I also recognize that, like any major lifestyle change, it can be difficult to change/unlearn years or decades of habits and traditions, and different approaches for weaning off of animal products will probably work for different people, so I am sympathetic to that--I ate animal products for the first 22 years of my life, after all. But just like that old proverb, "The best time to
plant a treego vegan was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."And, of course, watching vegan documentaries, videos, reading articles, etc. is a good way to expand one's knowledge for why people choose to become vegan in the first place and can be a good motivating tool for making more ethical lifestyle changes. Like for me personally, once I made the change finally and after I'd learned about the many atrocities that occur every day in meat and dairy industries, the idea of ever supporting these industries in any capacity was so revolting to me that that helped make my transition easier and reiterated why I made the change to begin with.
I am not managing my life well now. Like most Americans if the store brand snack products were vegan I wouldn't know the difference or care. Like ramen? Appart from some animal gells I am pretty sure that is vegan now
I'm sympathetic to life challenges, having gone through them myself and continuing to do so, as some of my recent posts/comments in other communities would convey, but I guess I also feel like it doesn't necessarily preclude someone from making more ethical changes to their life in the meantime, even minor ones, because while I would vastly prefer everyone just dump every animal product they consume immediately, as much as it pains me to say it, that isn't going to work for everyone, but I do think that even minor changes (to start) count as something because every bit of animal product reduction is better than doing absolutely nothing at all. And hey, if you make minor changes and it turns out being quite simple, that can be a good source of motivation to cut out additional animal products as the next step, or maybe jumping to cutting them out altogether. And as always, continuing to educate yourself on the reasons to go vegan is absolutely critical if you want something like that to stick, because veganism is a lifestyle change embedded in ethics, and it's much more than just a diet (someone who only seeks to change their diet would be referred to as plant-based, but if they don't care about the ethics, it would be inaccurate to call them "vegan").
If you have interest in going vegan, this is a pretty good page that talks about the different processes one can take for transitioning: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/how-go-vegan