[Enhancement] Account: Onboarding wizard collects interests but never asks who to follow / connect with

Area: Account & identity (audit phase 1) · Surface: Account & identity — /onboarding flow · Dimension: existing-feature-improve · Severity: minor

Circle, Skool and Mighty front-load 'follow these people / join these spaces' into onboarding because a new member with zero connections has an empty feed and churns. We seed forum subscriptions and prompt for a photo, but never surface the suggestions engine (which already exists) during signup, so day-one social graph is empty until the user manually visits /friends/suggestions. This is a high-leverage activation gap given the scoring logic is already built.

Evidence

OnboardingController::show (OnboardingController.php:57-74) renders only topic categories + community forums; submit (124-181) subscribes to forums and auto-joins new-member-intros. The complete 'cushion' (saveQuickProfile, 300-341) captures avatar+bio+name. Nowhere in the flow does it suggest people to follow/friend — FriendController@suggestions (FriendController.php:796) exists and scores by mutual_count + shared_forums but is only reachable later via /friends/suggestions.

Suggested fix. Add a 'People to follow' step (or a section on /onboarding/complete) that renders the top results from FriendController@suggestions / a follow-suggestion query with one-tap Follow buttons, so members leave onboarding with a populated graph and feed.

Filed by the automated tenant-app audit (phase 1) and adversarially evidence-verified. Status: verified. Open — not yet actioned.