Follow a person, not just their publications

[ralyodio]

/authors/anthony-ettinger could tell you who somebody is and hand you a feed of everything they write, and then had nothing for the reader who wanted to be told. Following was only ever a blog or a topic, which are the two things a person is not: somebody with a blog, a newsletter and a podcast is three rows in feeds, and following all three by hand still misses the fourth when they start it.

This adds the third kind of follow, with the same bell beside it.

Behaves like the other two, everywhere they do

• The page renders the existing FollowControls, so the button flips in place and the bell appears beside it once you follow. Both are plain forms that still work with JavaScript off.
• /following grows a People section with its own unfollow, and their posts merge into the river attributed to the person rather than to whichever publication carried them. That attribution is the entire reason for following a human.
• The personal feed counts them, /account/alerts lists them, and an alert reads … · via Ada Lovelace.

One design choice worth reviewing

author_follows keys on author_id with a foreign key, which is the opposite of what topic_follows does. A topic slug is a topic's only identity, because topics is a rollup the poller rebuilds and a follow keyed to it would be deleted by a refresh. An author is a real row with a stable primary key and a unique identity_key the extractor merges on, and nothing in the codebase deletes one. So the FK is honest here, and it buys the cascade. A test pins it: deleting the author removes the follow rather than leaving one pointed at a 404.

The bug the tests found

usersWithAlerts decides which accounts the sender even looks at, and its EXISTS clauses were blogs and topics. A reader whose only alerts were on people would have been skipped entirely, silently, forever — the follow would record, the bell would light up, and nothing would ever arrive. alertingAccountCount carried the same predicate and the same gap, so it would then have under-reported the sender's own health on /crawlstats. Both now include the third table.

Verified

End to end in a headless browser against a seeded author with two feeds:

step	result
signed out	button invites sign-in, no bell
signed in, click Follow	flips to Following ✓, no navigation
bell	🔕 Alerts off → 🔔 Alerts on
/following	People section, names her, both posts in the river
/account/alerts	lists her

Plus new tests: follow idempotency, the bell refusing a follow that does not exist, an alerting person yielding posts from every feed they write for, dead feeds contributing nothing, the FK cascade, river attribution, and dedupe when a post arrives by both a person and a topic.

pnpm -r test 1,093 pass / 0 fail, pnpm build clean, both on Node 22 (CI's version).

Not in scope

No follower count on the profile, and no backfill: an author follow starts alerting from the moment the bell is switched on, the same as the other two.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code