question related to joins - we have query like so:

{
  "q": "*",
  "query_by": "name,username",
  "filter_by": "$followers(userId:=999)"
}

which in the above example gets all followers for user 999 - which the join nicely maps to the users collection via followers schema:

"name": "followerId",
      "optional": false,
      "reference": "users.private.uid",

This does as we need to get a list of all of a user's followers, but in the UI when rendered, we have a button/status of "following" next to each one which shows if that one follows back