Following users and projects

Autonomy Edge has a light social layer: you can follow users, star projects, and (eventually) watch projects to get notified about new releases. The combination shapes what appears in your feed and your trending recommendations.

Following a user

Open any user's profile (click their avatar or name anywhere on the platform: in a thread, a project card, the followers list). At the top of their profile is a Follow button.

  • Click Follow to start following. The button switches to Following.
  • Click Following to unfollow.

What following someone does:

  • Their public project creations and updates appear in your Recents feed.
  • Their follower count goes up by one.
  • (When the Recommended feed launches, your follows influence what you see.)

The user can see who follows them via their profile's follower list. The numbers (N followers · M following) are shown publicly on every profile.

Starring a project

See Pinning and stars for the full breakdown. Quick recap:

  • Stars are public. They count.
  • Starred projects show up on your profile's Stars tab.
  • Stars influence recommendations and trending.
  • You can only star public projects.

Watching a project

Watch is a future feature. The idea: subscribe to a project's lifecycle events, new releases, milestone PRs, breaking changes, without starring it for endorsement. The button for this lives in the project page header alongside Star and Fork once it ships.

Who follows you

On your own profile (click your avatar → My Profile):

  • Below your avatar, the N followers · M following numbers are clickable.
  • Clicking followers opens the list of users who follow you.
  • Clicking following opens the list of users you follow.

You can navigate to anyone in the list to see their profile, or click Unfollow directly from your following list.

Privacy considerations

  • Following is public. Anyone visiting your profile can see your follower/following counts.
  • You cannot block followers today. If you receive unwelcome attention, report the user via the forum's flagging mechanism (the same Report action used for posts) and the moderators will take action.
  • Group chat invitations are not tied to follows: they're tied to a Privacy setting in your account. See Settings → Privacy.

What follows do not do

  • They do not grant access to private projects. Privacy and follows are independent. Following an org owner doesn't let you see the org's private repos.
  • They do not start a DM channel. Direct messaging is opt-in via the forum's messaging UI; see Messaging.
  • They do not auto-subscribe you to forum replies. Forum subscriptions are per-thread, not per-user.

Where to next