Hi, thank you for checking out Fruitarians.net! My name is Lena, I am also known as Fruitarian Lena. I am a long-term vegan fruitarian, the founder of the site (the former International Fruitarian Network) - my attempt to provide an independent inviting platform for all people to tell about their ethical lifestyle choices, and to participate in the civil public debate. Currently, I am considering my options in building an interesting resource on fruitarianism. 

I believe the future of humanity depends on our ability to come to certain agreements. 

If you are interested in realistic approaches to fruitarianism and veganism, in ethical and environmental changes we can make, and in attracting people to an open conversation about these topics, beyond cooking, looks and fitness, please help me to to develop Fruitarians.net with new ideas and to join the conversation in public videos.

My plans for the future of this site are summarized in this public letter to past and future participants and supporters.

Introduction

During the recent years, I concentrated on encouraging everyone to increase fresh fruit consumption to recommended levels. In the past, as an admin of the fruitarian social network, I alone was responsible for the web development, managing and financing it without monetization of any kind. The task required more and more of my limited resources, and I put the development on hold after I had a problem with CPU-usage of the site due to spam and misuse, and could not resolve the issues for weeks. I redirected the domain to the Fruitarian facebook page and shared reports there. I also was very busy in real life, but now I found time to reinstall the site, and hope to be able to invest some time each week into this projects. I am open for ideas and collaboration. 

Subjects I want to concentrate on: 

1. Inviting for most people variations of fruitarianism, and also veganism and vegetarianism.
2. Realistic approach to diets based on fruits and seeds.
3. Using information acquired by scientific method or from individual experiences reasonably. 

Some of you know me as one of the first critics of various versions of raw vegan diets, like the one promoted by 30bananasaday.com (I was blocked from the site in 2010 for a critical article about their method, which was published here). Long before that and after, I actively participated in vegan communities, and organized multiple fruitarian discussion groups on various social sites. Most of the vegetarian sites went down along the way, and the newer large vegan groups on big networks have now much lower levels of participation. 

As a skeptic fruitarian, I am still in disagreement with some elements of the mainstream vegan philosophy. For a few years, I was not active in vegan online communities, because I was disappointed with propaganda-like disinformation, anti-scientism, excessive commercialization, separatism, and concentration on looks and sport results. 

Years ago, I decided to discuss fruitarianism and veganism online only publically, with a few exceptions when someone wanted to talk about their specific private situation, and I still think it is the best way to do it for me. 

Goals

• My minimal goal in vegan fruitarianism is to tell the world that it is possible to live a regular life as a fruitarian, and it is not necessary to follow my example.
• My small goal is to be a noticeable voice for ethical choices in life.
• My bigger goal and wish is to be a part of a team of good people, who maintain an open public dialogue in video, speech, and text, interesting for wider audiences, according to the best practices in argumentation.
• My big goal is to participate in a peaceful and inclusive movement.
• And the biggest goal is to have virtually no need to invest my time in popularisation of ethical choices, because many respectable people already do their best and impact the rest of us: our laws, cultures and daily life. 

The Site Fruitarians.net

In the last months, I seriously considered giving up on this site, but decided to make one another serious effort to communicate my message through it. I am driven to share my fairly unique views and experience, and to find friends and conversation partners.

The site you see now is relaunched, using a different framework in OO PHP - the one I have tested in other projects and programmed for, a much more reliable one than the previous. I have these publishing plans for the site:

• Articles and videos (hopefully, also by guest authors); 
• In-depth interviews, in writing or video;
• Collection of data from credible sources related to fruitarianism,
• Responses and commentary to some relevant ideas;
• Answers to questions (if possible, by several knowledgeable people on each).

I am working on a long list of questions for a universal interview - same questions for all participants. Two very interesting fruitarians have already agreed to give me this interview, including Anne Osborn. I have asked only a few people yet, and will reach more awesome people as soon as I am happy with the set of questions.

The Facebook Page Fruitarian's

My page fb.me/Fruitarians and other communities earned thousands of supporters by providing short relevant reports from reliable sources (e.g. pear-reviewed scientific publications on nutrition and environment). I created the page back in 2009 or 2008, just to indicate that I am a fruitarian. There were no other pages about fruitarianism on facebook at that time, and only a few internet resources on fruitarianism, and almost all of them featured magical or unsubstantiated reasons. 

Since recent times, Facebook wants to be paid for delivery of the posts to the page subscribers, and in the last couple of years I watched my page been practically silenced. After one of their changes, the average number of people reached went from thousands to under a hundred, and I was spammed with "boost for $5" and "promote" buttons and ads. Now my posts are shown only to a few people, and if a couple of them share or like, then to more. I might pay for some of the key posts in the future, I do not know yet how effective it would be.

 Videos on The YouTube Channels

After moving to a different area here in California, I asked myself whether I would travel for an hour to meet one great person to talk about fruitarianism, and yes, I would do it regularly. Through the internet though, I could share my thoughts in videos with potentially more people, and have higher probability to find those who are interested to discuss them with me. I have published analytical articles in the past, a few had some impact, but it looks like people prefer to receive and exchange information visually or by listening. 

Simply talking on a video, responding to questions and ideas, in a manner similar to real life conversations or video calls - that is how I want to make videos. In 2014, I went back to college full time for four semesters, mainly for documentary filmmaking, but on a personal channel I want to present myself the way I usually am with my friends, with minimal editing. 

I have two channels dedicated to vegan fruitarianism on Youtube:

1. Fruitarian Lena youtube.com/FruitarianLena - my old small personal channel with 80+ subscribers and ~14K views.
2. Fruitarians.net youtube.com/FruitariansNet - a channel I reserve for publishing other materials, and maybe a documentary film on fruitarianism (my largest future project I've been working toward, concept of which had changed just recently). 

For the first channel I plan to make short public videos on these topics in playlists:

• "Vegan Fruitarian Reality" series - talking about realistic approach to ethical lifestyle choices.
• "Fruitarian Frustration" - addressing difficulties of maintaining a diet based on fresh fruit in western societies, philosophical questions, and possible psychological issues (social life, relationships, etc.).
• "Live (on YouNow) with Fruitarian Lena" - live sessions of broadcast, featuring guests and answering questions from the audience. This is my first improvised test live session with a small audience (6-8 people) on the hashtag #vegan on September 22, 2016.
• "Questions and Answers" - I will answer related to fruitarianism and veganism questions from the supporters and offer my suggestions. 
• "Letters to my Teenage Self" (maybe) - expressing best tips and warnings that could have helped me when I started: my ways to assess situations, and to make a decision, which is both ethical and self-serving.

Voting and commenting on this channel are enabled, and the statistics are made public. 

For Your Future Involvement

I would greatly appreciate your advice or participation (e.g. giving me an interview, leaving a comment with a piece of advice, communicating with me through video).

For Your Financial Support

If you are in a position to support independent projects finantially, for the ongoing financial contribution on Patreon $1 will be plenty, but I also was able to come up with two rewards - I am fairly certain I can invest enough time every month, and possibly weekly, taking time partially from my other passion and responsibilities (business, job, friends). I have prepared a page patreon.com/FruitarianLena for that. If you support me there, or with the Youtube button (youtube.com/FruitarianLena), I will be deeply grateful for allowing me to dedicate more time to this site.

Your Past Participation

Special thanks to each of you who was registered on this site before! I invite you to answer my interview questions to be published here as a representation of your position towards fruitarianism.

Thank you very much for your interest! 

Lena