Most of these folks are absolutely not masking in their daily lives and it is very apparent in their posting. @mononoke@lemmy.sdf.org hits the nail on the head (especially the comparison to veganism, something I myself am still largely guilty of.) but to add to that, while the site is for the most part okay with mentioning that covid still exists, you will often get crickets in response to the suggestion they should mitigate it or have to look at the consequences of it. Not to toot my own horn but I’ve been around here since pretty much the beginning throwing a lot of bits at the wall and I have a feel for what comments and posts are going to land and what to expect and anything I make that mentions/implies that the general hexbear populace should be masking tends to take longer to gather upvotes or just flatout tanks. It’s funny because people have a habit of just upvoting all the top level comments and I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve dropped the first comment of a post mentioning masking and when I come back later in the day like every top level comment in the post will have around the same number of upvotes but the pro-masking one will be significantly less despite containing the general sentiment of the other comments. And that’s if I don’t get pushback, because occasionally you will still get someone that does not believe covid is a thing anymore, repeats that “just a cold/flu” shit, or just gets flat out offended at the implication they’re contributing to eugenic policy.

I can’t remember the exact wording, but y’all folks remember the New Years Log Off Touch Grass and Kiss Someone post that got so popular a few years ago? If there was a moment where we really lost the site, I think that was it. That wasn’t the specific post that caused it, but in many ways c/covid eventually being forced to take such a hardline stance against minimization without the admins following through on the rest of the site was probably a point of no return.

It’s implicit. I’ve been a lurker for some time; check any of the social megathreads and you’ll certainly see people constantly going on about gatherings, restaurants, organizing this and that in person. These people are not masking. The ones that are will be talking about it, because it is impossible to be masking in the current year and also be social without noticing the dissonance. Any pushback to this point will be met with apathy at best, hostility at worst. It seems to be treated like veganism, where there is an unspoken policy that everyone acknowledges it is the correct stance to take…but if someone is not following it through for whatever reason, they just aren’t going to mention it at all, and doing so is breaking decorum. In this case “don’t ask don’t tell” doesn’t work when you still mingle about going to bars or concerts or whatever else like nothing is going on. This itself is a form of (normalized) violence, which is where “this site is pro-eugenics” comes from, a sentiment I am in agreement with because the base of modern society is pro-eugenics.