trigger email when post is published by someone a user follows

Was able to figure out that the meta value was being stored as a string, which doesn’t play nice with the meta query.

So what I had to do was do a like comparison with the serialized string version of my meta value. The meta query ended up like this

$args = array (
    'meta_query'     => array(
        array(
            'key'   => 'following',
            'value'   => serialize( strval( $uid ) ),
            'compare'   => 'LIKE',

        )
    )
);

for more insght, check out this other post that helped me

How can I create a meta_query with an array as meta_field?