Following and the feed

Following someone on Network is the most consequential thing you can do — it's what tells the platform whose stock and whose voice should fill your feed. This article covers how the follow flow works in both directions, what your /network feed actually looks like once you've followed a few sellers, and how to clean things up when you change your mind.

Hitting "Follow"

The Follow button lives on every seller's Network profile (/network/u/{handle}), every Suggested-dealers card, and every post header. It has three states:

• Follow — you don't follow this seller yet.
• Requested — you've sent a follow request to a private seller and they haven't decided yet.
• Following — you follow them. Hover or tap to unfollow.

What happens when you hit Follow depends on the seller's privacy setting:

Public profiles — auto-accept

Most sellers run public profiles. Tap Follow and you're following them immediately. Their posts start appearing in your feed on the next refresh, and they get a notification that you followed them.

Private profiles — request and approve

A seller can switch their profile to private in /network/settings. When they do:

• Their posts disappear from /explore and from the public posts-grid view at /network/u/{handle}.
• Other buyers tapping Follow on their profile or cards send a follow request instead of a direct follow.
• The seller sees pending requests and decides one by one whether to accept or deny.
• The seller gets a real-time notification for each new request.

While a request is pending, your button shows Requested with an option to Withdraw. If the seller accepts, the button flips to Following and you start seeing their posts. If they deny, the button quietly returns to Follow — there's no rejection notification, intentionally.

The moment a private seller switches their profile back to public, all pending requests are accepted in bulk — that's by design, so the seller doesn't have to triage a backlog after a temporary lockdown.

Why someone might run a private profile

A few normal patterns:

• Wholesale-only dealers who don't want retail buyers in their feed.
• Sellers in a soft-launch phase who want to curate the early audience before going public.
• Operators with non-standard inventory that's not ready to be advertised broadly.

There's no commercial penalty for being private — verification, listings and TradeCircles all keep working as normal. The only thing private mode controls is the Network feed.

Your /network feed — what's actually in it

Once you follow at least one active seller, opening /network shows you their posts in a single timeline.

The feed is chronological — newest first — and contains:

• Original posts from sellers you follow.
• Sponsored or featured posts from Haubot, very rarely, clearly labelled (we keep this dial dialled all the way down on purpose).

The feed does not contain:

• Posts from sellers you don't follow.
• Posts from sellers in your Suggested rail unless you actively followed them.
• Random "you might like this" injections.

The job of the feed is to be predictable. If a post is in your feed, it's because someone you decided to follow chose to publish it.

When you reach the bottom, you'll see You've reached the end — that means we've shown you everything from the people you follow, in order, with no skips. Pull-to-refresh or scroll back up to the top to fetch new posts when they arrive.

Empty feed?

If your feed is empty, it's almost always because you haven't followed anyone yet. The page will offer you two CTAs:

• Explore trending → sends you to /network/explore, where you can scroll through what's hot from across the platform.
• Browse dealers sends you to the dealer directory, organised by region and specialty.

Follow a few sellers from either surface and your feed fills in within seconds.

Managing your follows

The /network/following page lists every seller you follow, with a quick Unfollow button on each. It's also where you can do bulk cleanup if your feed has drifted.

Unfollowing is silent — the other side does not get a notification. The seller won't know unless they manually check their followers list and notice you're no longer there, which most sellers don't.

If you unfollow a seller and later refollow them:

• For a public seller, you're back in immediately.
• For a private seller, you go through the request-and-approve flow again. Approval is at the seller's discretion.

Who follows you

Sellers can see their followers list in their own dashboard — that's where you'd land too if you have a seller profile. The follower count on your Network profile is public; the follower list itself is visible to you (the profile owner) and (depending on your settings) to followers.

When someone new follows you (or requests to), it shows up in the bell in the top-right of the page, not in the old /network/activity page. See Notifications for which events fire.

A note on follow vs Suggested

The right rail on /network contains a Suggested dealers card. These aren't sellers you follow — they're profiles the platform thinks you'd be interested in based on the categories of listings you've viewed and the sellers your followed-sellers also follow. Tapping Follow there acts the same as anywhere else (immediate for public, request for private). For more on suggestions, see Discovery and search.

Next steps

• Creating posts — once people follow you, this is what they see.
• Stories and engagement — the lighter-weight options around the long-lived post.
• Discovery and search — finding sellers worth following in the first place.