Spotify friends activity empty/not updating

[Tonasj]

Plan

Premium

Country

Finland

Device

Pc

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

For several months (pretty much years at this point), my Spotify friends feed has not been updating, it only shows 1 friend I have, while it should have a dozen others. This has been going on for far too long for it to be a problem on my end as I have changed my devices, settings, and other things to try and fix it. I have reinstalled Spotify and my OS but nothing helps. I also see no friends through my Facebook integration even after disconnecting and reconnecting my Facebook profile multiple times. All my settings are the same as my friends and he can see his friend activity but I can't. I already posted about this problem once, and was told it would fix itself but that was months ago. This is very infuriating as it has been going for so long.

[Tonasj]

We have seen the reports of people saying Friend Feed is not working for them, and we are happy to investigate specific cases, because as far as we are aware, there are no issues with Friend Feed working.

Firstly, it’s important to restate that ALL users had “Share my listening activity on Spotify” turned off as default - so users you followed and saw in your Friend Feed in the past, will no longer show in your Friend Feed, UNLESS they turned “Share my listening activity on Spotify” back on. 

Also worth noting that you don’t need Facebook set up for Friend Feed to work.

Having said that, all of the below must be true for users to show in your Friend Feed:

• You must be following the friend whose activity you want to see.
• The friend must have enabled the setting to publish their activity:
• Share my listening activity on Spotify - toggled on.
• The friend must have played more than 30 seconds of a track on iOS, Android or Desktop in the last 7 days.
• This can’t be in a Private Session.
• Also you should both have restarted the App at some point recently.

If all of this is true for you and your friend and they don’t show up in your Friend Feed, then:

• We need you, and the friend you are following, to post here saying you give us permission to check your accounts.
• We need explicit written permission from both of you.
• We can't test this with one person's username and permission.  
• It’s enough to post here, we can find your username based on your Community profile. 

Once we have this we can do some checking. Thanks all.

[ElleG22]

I've also lost the ability to see my friends' listening activity--it's not worked for the last 2 weeks. The Friend Activity pane has a "Go to Settings > Social and enable..." message. The settings ARE enabled.

I have tried the double reboot on my Mac and my iPhone; that did not work. 

I just tried the "clean reinstall" per these instructions on both laptop and iPhone and the problem persists. Super annoying, would really like a solve that works for this!

I'm listening on a 2016 MacBook Pro, with Spotify for Mac OS (Intel) 1.1.74.631.g0b24d9ad, and Mac OS Monterey 12.0.1 as of yesterday, but was on the previous OS before that. My phone is an iPhone 7, running iOS 14.7.1.

[jrham]

I had to unmark this as the solution. Though the steps you provided brought back the friends activity to my panel, I have found that my friends activity is not in real time, it appears frozen most of the time. I have been able to contact a small handful of friends (who are also very upset about their sharing being set to private without them knowing), and they set their sharing to publicly share. So I'm not sure what to do now. You've provided a solution in part to my concern by making the app display the feed, but my biggest issue remains. "Bring Back "Friend Activity" / "See what friends are Playing", the title of this post, is the Idea I'm marching for. Please don't automatically set friends listening activity to "Private". Send out a newsletter to users telling them that they have the option to set the listening to private.

[jrham]

These steps brought back my display, but the issue still remains; Spotify removed an essential feature by making what my friends are listening to private unless they switch it to public. That is what I'm protesting. Please set the default back to what it was and make an announcement to its users that they can set their sharing to "off".

[Kiril]

Hey everyone,

Thanks for reaching out about this here in the Community. 

The behavior you're seeing on your Friend Feed is expected and this is caused by a change that was made to the listening activity setting.
 
You can head over to this thread which explains this in full detail. Keep in mind that to see someone's (the profiles you follow) listening activities, they need to have explicitly allowed for this to happen by switching on this Social setting of the app for themselves.

Hope this clears things up. If you have any questions or need anything else, the Community is here for you.

[Kiril]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for posting about this in the Community.

@funky3578 and @_sigh_, please keep in mind that this toggle allows your personal activities to be shared and seen on Spotify, which means your friends (the profiles who you follow) need to have this setting also toggled to on in order for you as their follower to see their listening activities. We hope this makes sense and if you're sure that they have explicitly allowed for this to happen and their activities are still not being shared, then you might try the suggestion we give below as well.

@tsamius, in this case we can suggest to ask your friends to toggle the Listening activity setting to off and then to switch it back on after a day, to see if this will shake things up and help for the resynchronization between the servers and accounts. It's also important to be noted that listening activities are being shared only when streaming directly from the desktop or mobile app, and not while casting or using other smart devices to play music.  

Hope this helps and clears things up. If you have any questions or need anything else, the Community is here for you.

[Wobniar]

anyone found the solution to this problem? 

[rhnfzl]

This thread is not solved at all. Still facing the issue from past one week.

[djcorileigh]

I am also glad that others are as stressed about this as I am. The friend activity feature was the main reason I became a premium user so many years ago. The fact that it is broken is simply devastating as I found so many new artists this way. Not sure I can continue to justify paying for premium without my favorite feature.

[KevinBurnett]

That really is not an adequate solution.  This should be reverted to the way it was before.

[Sherimaochua]

hi many of my friends and I are also experiencing this issue. Im not sure why I am able to see some of my friends accounts but unable to see some. Ive already reinstalled it and logged in and out multiple times. Please fix this so I am able to see all my friends activity instead of just a few. Thanks

[JJLI27]

I can only see 3 of the ppl I am following now on the desktop app but they are sharing content bc if you search by name, you can see recenntly played artists in their profile. It only stopped displaying on screen. THIS IS TERRIBLE SPOTIFY PLEASE FIX THIS. Does not seem to have to do with a privacy update!

[slz85s6z7so0n1zixnwi]

What now? admins??? any solution?

[Sammistar215]

The problem with this update is that, once again, users were not informed. I really don’t care who can see what I’m listening to, but my friend feed toggled off automatically without my permission. Most users probably won’t turn it back on because they don’t realize it’s off. There should have been a pop up when the update took place, asking users if they would like to have friend activity on or off. This, alongside not allowing us to share our top 100 2021 playlists, is another huge 2021 fail. Spotify is becoming increasingly less user friendly and people are going to jump ship.

[licey]

Yup, having the same problem here, i thought it would back to normal again after several days but it turns out nothing happened. i have 15 friends but in the friend activity its just showing 3 of my friends, i really wanna see the rest of them, please send help. also i tried to logging out and logging back in few times, and nothing happened, still 3 friends showing up :). AND some of my friends are going through the same problem. Better fix it real quick, i think its been 2 week like this and its uncomfortable. please help, thank you🙏

[RaraCool]

I thought I was the only one. I'm using the Microsoft Store version and this happened to me after I signed out. Presumably it just updated, but I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what went wrong. They need to fix this, Friend Activity and Connect are the only two features keeping me with Spotify, and if this isn't resolved soon, I'm already looking into YouTube Premium.

[_sigh_]

Hello @Kiril, I double checked with my best friend and they have it enabled. Still can't see friend activity though.

[AndyBridges]

This was an extremely unfortunate change. I guess the real corporate intent was to force Spotify users to connect the service to Facebook, which I will not to at all.  Some of my Spotify contacts are not my contacts elsewhere, so I have no means to reach them out to ask them to switch the sharing toggle on.

[Vikarei]

Okay everyone I'm updating you all with a response because I've done a test and researched further into this. Spotify genuinely chose to revert ALL accounts to "do not share" because they didn't CHOOSE to share originally and it is now viewed as a privacy issue. I confirmed with a friend that his activity was set to "do not share" and asked him to check it back to share. I'll also add that I haven't been shown his activity yet as this took place less than 1 hour ago I will update later if it pops up! 

Finally I wanted to say this as well... SPOTIFY if someone important enough sees this! I've looked into it and A LOT of people are upset by this change. I recommend notifying your users that you've made this change directly so that they can then choose to opt into the sharing feature as some of us have no contact with the people we follow outside of the app.

Cheers everyone!

[appleblok]

YESSSS THISSS ^^^^^^^^^ PLEASE SPOTIFY

[SherlocksMom]

Having the same problem -  even though my friends are sharing their activity, I can no longer see them.