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.
this is directed more generally (from the "We are just to lazy figure out how to live properly") rather than at you personally, cos i know individual circumstances can make things harder. i know that when i was an omni, i had all sorts of excuses but like you say, they really all boiled down to "going vegan is hard and scary". for me as a mayo, vegetables were mostly those sad sides that went along your big lump of meat and you had to kinda force yourself to eat them to pretend to be healthy. veganism seemed like a life of impossible monastic-level self-denial, of living just on bits of lettuce and raw carrot or whatever or overpriced shitty fake-meat sausages. something only the most committed people with superhuman willpower could do, not just some regular depressed lazy idiot like me.
and then when i switched, it was way easier than i ever thought it could be. the first month was absolutely hard, not gonna lie, and i was kinda the new vegan meme. but once i figured out a few easy staple recipes that worked for me (mostly of the "shove a bunch of shit in a pot and leave it for half an hour and eat with rice" type that make a few days' worth in one go), and worked out which regular groceries were vegan or not, it was really remarkably smooth sailing and also way cheaper and healthier and really tasty. it inspired me to actually learn to cook basic easy shit, and i was able to feel proud of even my most basic creations. others will find different staple foods that work for them, maybe more basic, maybe fancier (i also eat very lazy shit when i cant be bothered at all). eating out is probably the trickiest bit, but happycow really helps with that. and i went from one of those "i could never live without bacon and cheese" people to literally never missing either of them (or anything else for that matter). and it also did wonders for my mental health to be taking some concrete positive action to live more consistently with my values. on top of everything else, its absolutely the best thing ive ever done for myself
not to imply at all that people should go vegan cos of personal benefits, thats not what its about. you should go vegan cos of animal liberation (which i agree that most people here already know is correct), but you can go vegan because its much easier than you think and its not a life of grim self-denial like youve been led to believe but actually cool and good
Absolutely agree with all of this, and I guess the only other thing I'll say is that vegan faux-meats/dairy product substitutes have never been better than they are now, and they are very widely available now, Soap_Owl. And a lot of stuff that you are probably already familiar with is already accidentally vegan.