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 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