Follow & People
Published Jul 8, 2026
Learning a skill goes faster when you can see who else is on the same path. Praxis924's Follow & People feature turns a solo curriculum into a small network: you can search for other learners, open their public profile, follow the ones building the skills you care about, and get notified when someone follows you back. This guide is for any learner with an account, and by the end you'll know how to find people, follow and unfollow them, read a public profile, and tell who's online right now.
What you'll need
- A registered Praxis924 account (email verified). If you signed up but never confirmed, finish the email verification step first — some social actions expect a fully activated account.
- A moment to fill in your own profile. Following is directional and public, so before you go looking for others, open your editable profile, add an avatar (avatar upload is supported), and write a short bio. A complete profile is what makes people follow you back.
Tip: Presence and profiles are only as useful as the profile behind them. Set your avatar and bio first — a blank profile gets far fewer follows.
Step 1 — Find people
Open /people. This is the directory of learners on your instance. Use member search to look someone up by name, or browse the list to discover learners who are active in the same technologies and frameworks you're studying.
Search matches against member profiles, so partial names work. If you already know exactly who you want, typing their name is the fastest route; if you're exploring, scroll the directory and let the results surface people building adjacent skills.
Step 2 — Open a public profile
Click any member to open their public profile at /people/[userId]. A profile is a read-only view of that learner: their avatar and bio, and their follower/following relationships. This is where you decide whether their focus overlaps with yours before you commit to following.
Because profiles are public, anyone can view yours too. Nothing private (your progress internals, notes, or graded attempts) is exposed here — the public profile is the outward-facing identity, not your private learning record.
Step 3 — Follow (and unfollow)
On a member's profile, use the Follow button. The relationship is directional: following someone does not automatically make them follow you back, exactly like a one-way subscription. You're saying "I want to keep this person in view," and they're free to reciprocate or not.
To reverse it, open the same profile and click Unfollow. The action is immediate and quiet — unfollowing does not send a notification, so you can curate who you follow without any awkwardness. Follow the people whose skill path mirrors or leads yours; unfollow when your focus shifts.
Step 4 — See who's online
Praxis924 tracks online presence, so the directory and profiles surface who's active right now. Presence is driven by the same session and heartbeat signals that power the activity feed, which means it reflects genuine current activity rather than a stale "last seen weeks ago" flag.
Use this to time your reach-out: if someone you follow is online and you're both working through the same framework, it's a good moment to compare notes in a lesson discussion thread or ask a question.
Step 5 — Get notified when someone follows you
When another learner follows you, you receive a follower notification through the in-app notifications system. That's your cue to open their profile at /people/[userId], see what they're building, and decide whether to follow back. Reciprocal follows are how the small network around a shared skill actually forms.
Note: Follows generate a notification for the person being followed; unfollows do not. This is intentional — it keeps follow counts honest without punishing anyone for changing who they track.
When it goes wrong
| Symptom | Likely cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A member isn't in search | Name typo, or they haven't set a searchable profile | Try a shorter partial name; browse the /people list directly |
| Follow button seems stuck | Transient network hiccup on the action | Refresh the profile page; the state reflects the server, not a local guess |
| No follower notifications arriving | Notifications not being checked | Open your in-app notifications; follower events land there, not by email |
| Everyone shows as offline | Presence needs an active session/heartbeat | Confirm you're logged in and the tab is active; presence keys off live sessions |
/people page won't load in production | Nginx proxy trailing-slash trap on the API | This is an infra config issue, not your account — report it to an admin |
Tip: Follow is a curation tool, not a leaderboard. A tight list of a few people building the exact skill you're chasing is worth more than following everyone.
What you get
Once you're following a handful of learners, Praxis924 stops feeling like a private course and starts feeling like a cohort. You have a curated set of people whose progress and presence you can glance at, public profiles you can revisit at /people/[userId], and a notification loop that tells you when someone wants to follow your journey.
From here, pair Follow with the rest of the community layer: jump into lesson-scoped discussions on the lessons you share, drop likes on lessons a person you follow recommends, and keep an eye on the activity feed to see what your network is working through. The follow graph is the connective tissue — the discussions, notifications, and presence signals are what make it worth having.