No I do think you absolutely have a point!

That more young people than you would expect are missing from places like Lemmy I blame mostly on smartphones and tablets.

Over the last decades the numbers of students who own PCs/Laptops have dropped. When I first worked as a lecture assistant for computational statistics that was around 2011 almost every student had a PC or laptop and knew how to use it (to a different extent between them, of course).

The course is once a year, has about 90 students each time and, since it's about statistics, there is a mix of students from different fields. Most are from STEM fields, a few from social science or psychology. I could basically watch tech literacy deteriorate over the years.

This years course had only a third of people in it who actually use a PC/Mac outside of the course. There was not a single person who uses Linux this year. For the university's lecture platform or for online lectures they use their phone, tablet or a tablet computer which runs Android or iOS.

78 % of them did never write a line of code in their lifes, or so they say. The ones who did say they have programming experience often only had one of these "Learning to Code" Apps on their phones.

Most of them need extensive instruction and hand holding to install the programs we use (which is R and RStudio). You do not want to imagine how it is to teach these students basic coding in R. It is both my biggest joy and my biggest sorrow. The stories I could tell....

I highly doubt many of these students would find their way to the Fediverse. They do not think about privacy or freedom online because they are disconnected from the online world, in a way. They are simply consumers who do not feel as a part of it.