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.