Primates can use smartphones.

Humans are primates, my guy. Of course we can use smartphones. We invented them.

We’ve made the format so user friendly we have other species which can meaningfully interact with it. You don’t really “learn” how to use a smartphone, the designs are just that good now. Apple holds 57% of the cell phone mobile market, and their UI is nearly perfect for usability.

This is an insanely specious argument based in, seemingly, nothing. Like, I’m sorry but this is pure opinion. If you have citations for this, please share, otherwise I’m going to ignore it as entirely pointless and irrelevant to our discussion.

We have no metrics because this is all brand new and no one is collecting metrics

Probably a good reason not to making sweeping claims about composition of the ecosystem, then, huh?

My hypothesis, which is by definition just a hunch

Well, a hypothesis is an assumption. The underlying definition of a hypothesis implies eventual research and testing. Which I don’t think is going to happen here. What you do have is an assumption, but it’s just an assumption.

is that we can make some pretty strong guesses on the demographic makeup of lemmy.

I would (conditionally) disagree.

I would suspect the makeup is predominantly center left people in the united states who likely work in tech of some fashion, aged 24 to 35,

I would say that it’s Gen Z and Millennials (broadly speaking the age group you’re talking about). That’s purely based on the fact that those groups are the most online of any age group, so odds are good that Lemmy follows established trends as much as any other social media service. I don’t have any information to speculate on occupation or other demographic statistics, though.

I obviously have no solid evidence of this, I’m just going off the activity levels of the various instances. The OP in this question was whether lemmy was actively hostile to conservative viewpoints, and my response to that was and still is there isn’t going to be much of a conservative slant for lemmy yet because they have no reason to be here yet they have other social media that is infinitely more active than any lemmy instance.

I would say a good reason is also that most Lemmy instances are openly hostile to conservative viewpoints, by design. Like, they advertise a set of core principles and expected conduct that are typically antithetical to the kinds of things you stereotypically find in conservative spaces. That’s regardless of age. Beehaw is a good example of this. It’s a heavily moderated website with a fairly stringent code of conduct that explicitly says it operates in such a way as to totally prohibit any and all hate speech. Your typical reactionary can figure out that they aren’t welcome here unless they’re participating in such a way that betrays nothing of their ideology.

I’m not sure if you missed the context I was going for, or are purpoefully misconstruding it?

My main point was that you were presenting your case poorly based on the information you were providing, not that you were wrong. There is statistical data to support that most social media is accessed largely via mobile devices. You chose a hilariously poor statistic to support that argument, though. My case didn’t go farther than that.

the vast majority of the internet is browsed through mobile devices, reddit was an outlier. Twitter, snapchat, tiktok, instagram, facebook, all of them are browsed in the majority on mobile. The demographics skew even more towards mobile when you go world wide and not just the U.S. Mobile devices completely dominate the internet worldwide.

Your main point seems to be that old people only know how to access social media via the apps on their phones. This may be true. It might not. You don’t really have any evidence to support that statement, though. You have the argument that most social media use is done via the phone. But as we know from actual statistical data (like the results discussed here: https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/5-charts-that-show-how-and-why-you-should-reach-millennials-online), most social media is accessed by Gen Z and Millennials. Older Americans use social media far less than their younger counterparts. It’s just as plausible they access their social media via the medium they knew when they started using it: the PC.