Django Search in many to many field - django

Question

I am trying to create a search in my Django Rest Framework application I have a table of follower and following via one model called: UserFollowing and the code is:
class UserFollowing(TimeStampedModel):
user_id = models.ForeignKey(
User, related_name="following", on_delete=models.CASCADE, blank=True)
following_user_id = models.ForeignKey(
User, related_name="followers", on_delete=models.CASCADE, blank=True)
#property
def username(self):
profile_instance = Profile.objects.get(user=self.user_id)
username = profile_instance.profile_username
return username
#property
def name(self):
profile_instance = Profile.objects.get(user=self.user_id)
name = profile_instance.name
return name
class Meta:
unique_together = ("user_id", "following_user_id")
ordering = ["-user_id"]
def __str__(self):
return str(self.id)
Here everything works fine but in my following list API, I am appending username and name of the user. When I am getting a list of follower using:
paginator = PageNumberPagination()
query_set = UserFollowing.objects.filter(user_id=request.user.id)
context = paginator.paginate_queryset(query_set, request)
serializer = UserFollowingSerializer(context, many=True)
Now I want to search via the result my serializer.data look like:
{
"count": 2,
"next": null,
"previous": null,
"results": [
{
"id": 233,
"username": "Username1",
"user_profile_image": "url",
"name": "CDE",
"is_active": true,
"created_at": "2020-07-25T06:00:31.786154Z",
"updated_at": "2020-07-25T06:00:31.786185Z",
"user_id": 88,
"following_user_id": 53,
"is_following": true
},
{
"id": 49,
"username": "username",
"user_profile_image": "URL",
"name": "ABC",
"is_active": true,
"created_at": "2020-07-15T08:32:35.352484Z",
"updated_at": "2020-07-15T08:32:35.352517Z",
"user_id": 88,
"following_user_id": 144,
"is_following": true
}
]
}
So based on my output how can I search a result where username = What can be the best way to search in this case.