Announcements
The Spotify Stars Program: Celebrating Values Week!

Help Wizard

Step 1

NEXT STEP

Friend Feed failed to load

Friend Feed failed to load

Since about one week now my friend feed won't load. The right sidebar shows "Hmm, the Friend Feed failed to load." followed by a button labeled "TRY AGAIN".

 

What I tried:

I already tried to disable the right sidebar and re-enable it, I also tried to switch to offline mode and go back online to reload the friend feed, no success.

I wanted to check if the problem has something to do with my client (currently version o1.0.79.227.g00492af0 running on my Windows 7 desktop pc) so I logged off with my account and logged in with a friends account, the friend feed showed up correctly. Back with my account, it failed to load again.

I logged in with my account on some other pcs in different networks, tried it on windows and linux desktops (thats also why I didn't post this thread into the windows category bc it also occurs in linux) and my friend feed always fails to load even though the friend feed of other accounts works perfectly on those systems.

All this led me to the conclusion that it's not a problem with my client but with my account.

Reply
30 Replies

Hey @_tobi!

 

Thanks for reaching out to the community.

 

We've had reports like this and the right team is looking into the issue. You've pretty much done all the troubleshooting we can suggest.

 

Fingers crossed it'll be fixed soon.

 

Cheers.



“Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.”
― Maria Augusta von Trapp

Hey, thanks for your reply!

I've updated to the latest Spotify Version but the Problem still occurs. Yesterday I was able to test it out on a Spotify version that was slightly older than the one I had installed while the problem first occurred. It also didn't work which leads me to the conclusion that the occurrence of this problem is not depending on the version of the Spotify client.
The past week I got the chance to experiment a little and tested it out on some windows systems on which the friend feed definitely worked on other spotify accounts, it still didn't work with mine.
Just to be completely sure that the problem has nothing to do with my installation, I tried a complete reinstall based on your official online manual for it, still not fixed. After that, I did a reinstall in which I manually cleaned my system from any Spotify files or registry keys that were remaining after the uninstalling process, still no difference.
I also tried to view my friend feed in the windows-store-version of Spotify on a Windows 10 systen, no difference.

The last couple days I tried to dig deeper and searched through the windows application event log but I couldn't find anything related to Spotify.
I also tried to load my friend feed while having Microsoft DebugView running but it didn't catch any errors.
I used ProcessMonitor to catch the network activity of Spotify while trying to load the friend feed but I couldn't find anything interesting.

 

Thanks for all the info!

 

As soon as there's an update about this issue, you'll find it on this thread.

 

All the best.



“Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.”
― Maria Augusta von Trapp

I'm basically at my wit's end over here, I gave you all this information because I hope it would be helpful for the team that's working on the problem.
I'll try to experiment some more because I really need the friend activity feed. Right now I'm trying to reconstruct what I did to mess the feature for my account up.
Today I tried a method I found in a different thread ( https://community.spotify.com/t5/forums/v3_1/forumtopicpage/board-id/desktop_windows/page/1/thread-i... ) posted by @reggiemyveggies that suggested to delete the abba.json file in the Spotify user folder (C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Spotify\Users\spotifyname-user) but still without any success.


I'm actually having a suspicion, maybe this is related to the link between Spotify and Facebook. I had some issues linking my Facebook accout to Spotify, it's pretty broken (for example, my accounts are linked right now as it is shown in my Facebook settings but in my desktop app I still got the option to "Connect to Facebook" which is only available if my account isn't linked yet). I don't really care about this bug but it may eventually have something to do with this error.

friend feed.PNG

Same pb here. Since 3 weeks. And one friend of mine too.

 

Help Spotify !!

Today I discovered in another thread that it is actually possible to type the command "spotify:app:buddy-list" into the search bar to get the friend list. I tried this but then I get the "Hmm, the Friend Feed failed to load. TRY AGAIN" message in the body as well. I also updated to the latest version today but still no difference.

 

Interesting: if I'm actually offline and have no internet connection, my friend feed displays that it's not available offline, only when I'm online I get the error message. This leads me to the conclusion that the friend feed itself isn't actually broken but the connection to the friend feed server is. 

friend feed.PNG

I also checked every file that contains "log" in its name in the Local\Spotify and Roaming\Spotify folder but I couldn't find any sort of error-ish message.

Hey folks,

 

We understand the frustration. We can assure you this is being looked into. On a side not, it's not possible to keep track of all related threads, but we try out best.

 

To make sure you hear the latest about this, we'd recommend moving the conversation over to this thread

 

Hopefully we'll have a fix soon!

 


Hey @Chris , @Alfredo

 

since a couple days, the content of my right sidebar changed, now it looks like I'm not following anyone at all, it reads "See what your friends are playing" followed by the button "FIND FRIENDS".
If I follow someone now, it will show what that person is listening to but it doesn't show that for the accounts I'm already following (I can unfollow and then refollow people to get them to being displayed in the list). However, if I restart the app, the list is completely empty and shows the "See what your friends are playing" again.
Until yesterday, if I would refollow somebody, my right sidebar would show what that account is listening to but searching for "spotify:app:buddy-list" would still show an empty friend feed with the button "FIND FRIENDS" but that changed since the last update (I think).
What's pretty interesting is that if I resize the window, it triggers the friend feed to refresh and by that it clears the list, leading to the "FIND FRIENDS" being shown again. But if I now type in "spotify:app:buddy-list" or "spotify:buddy-list", it still shows what that person is listening to (but still not, what everybody I'm following is listening to). (See screenshot attached.)

Also interesting: if I delete the abba.json from the path Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Spotify\Users\[spotifyname]\ then the next time I run Spotify it creates a new abba.json file but it shows "Hmm, the friend feed failed to load" in the right sidebar. Now if I simply restart Spotify, it again shows the "See what your friends are playing".

I also installed the new update but still no fix.

 

Edit:

I also noticed that until a couple days ago, my friends weren't able to see what I'm listening to despite their friend feed being shown without a problem. Now, they can see what I'm listening to, only my friend feed is broken.

friend feed.PNG

I also just used Charles Web Debugging Proxy and discovered that the requests send to https://spclient.wg.spotify.com actually do get a 200 response.

i have this problem too, i tried uninstall and reinstall spotify, after reinstall friend feed back to work, but after i exit and open spotify again friend feed not working again.

I also completely removed Spotify from my firewall settings and added it again, still no difference.
I just used Charles Web Debugging Proxy again with an SSL certificate to record the SSL connection the Spotify Client does to the https://spclient.wg.spotify.com domain and discovered that if I force the friend feed to reload (by dis- and then re-enabling the right sidebar) I am actually getting a 1874 bytes sized response including the 372 bytes of the TSL handshake, leaving a body with a size of 1502 bytes.

Ugh, I think i found a more permanent workaround instead of deleting abba.
So what you have to do is go into C:\Users\(urNAME)\AppData\Local\Spotify\Users\(urNAME)-user.
Here find abba.json and open it up with a text editor.
You will see a long string of Flags, all you have to do is delete the first    "{"    (literally the first character).
Save, exit and right click on adda.json, select peroperties, here check the "Read Only" box and click apply.
Open up Spotify and see if it worked!

I was having the same issue and tried to redownload Spotify and found that there's only an error when i use the windows store version. Once I installed it from the spotify website worked. It doesn't explain why it didnt work on Linux. (this is the link)

I've been having this problem for over a month now and deleting the abba.json file before I launched spotify seemed to work; activity feed was still inaccurate but it's better than nothing. However, after updating Spotify my workaround stopped functioning.

I uninstalled spotify, reinstalled it through the Windows store and after that the Spotify website. Still does not work, in fact, the abba.json file doesn't get created anymore at all.

@DURNK Hey, I tried your workaround but sadly it didn't seem to work for me. I did notice a change with the abba.json though, before the last update, Spotify would show the "Hmm..."-Errormessage if there were no abba.json at the startup of the app and it would also create said file and the next time I would start the app it would show the actual empty friend feed. Since the last update, it always shows the empty friend feed even if there is no abba.json file in the folder.

I am having the same problem for quite awhile. I've tried restarting the app, my desktop, and even reinstalling the application.

I've found a fix my deleting my hosts file. I had a modified version to block ads on the

web and it must've caused issues.

 

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts 

 

(If you've never touched your hosts file then this fix probably won't work)

Deleting might be a quite vigorous action.

 

Rather open the hostfile (as adminstrator) find the line containing a spotify uri and put a "#" as first character in that line. Save it. Click the button try again in spotify. This should fix it indeed.

 

Still wondering how the entry was ever inserted in my hostfile though... 

Suggested posts