How to Fix “Friend Activity Not Showing” on Spotify?

Spotify comes with a ‘Friend activity’ feature that allows you to view the listening activity of friends you have followed on Spotify. This feature was originally enabled by default, and displayed activities of your friends automatically unless they had explicitly turned on the ‘Private session’.

However, recently there have been quite a few complaints by the users that they cannot view friend activity on the application, even when the option is enabled in Settings.

In this guide, we will walk you through several effective troubleshooting methods that did the trick for users, so let’s get right in!

Double-Check With Your Friends

Anyone who is currently broadcasting their listening activity with Friend Activity Feed without explicitly opting-in will have their broadcasting turned off. If you want to view your Friend’s activity, they will need to opt-in again. 

It is worth mentioning that Spotify has recently changed all accounts to “do not share” since sharing the activity was considered a privacy issue since users had to explicitly choose ‘Private mode’ if they did not want their friends to view their activity.

We recommend that you double-check with your friends to ensure that they have not enabled the ‘do not share’ mode on their Spotify accounts. However, if your friends have already configured the settings, move to the next step below.

Exclude Spotify from Firewall

In the case of a firewall with custom rules, your local Spotify installation may not be able to communicate with your server effectively. This might cause issues with certain features of the application, like the friend activity feature.

Several affected users who were previously dealing with this issue have reported that they were able to resolve it by establishing an exception rule for Spotify so that the firewall wouldn’t block it.

1. Open up a Run dialog box by pressing Windows key + R. 
2. Type ‘control firewall.cpl’ in the text field of the dialog box and hit Enter.
3. This will launch the Defender window. From there, click on Allow an app or feature through Windows Defender firewall.
   

   

4. In the next window, click on the Change settings button.
5. Locate Spotify in the list of applications mentioned on your screen, and make sure both the Public and Private boxes associated with it are check-marked.
   
   
6. Once done, restart your PC and check if the friend activity issue persists.

Reinstall Spotify

If you are unable to solve your problem with the quick method above, you may need to reinstall Spotify. Doing so will address the bugs and other corruption errors that might be causing the problem. Hopefully, this will fix the friends activity issue once and for all.

Here is what you need to do step-by-step:

1. Log in with your administrator account in Windows if you are using a standard user account.
2. Now type Control Panel in the search area of your taskbar and click Open.
3. Click on Uninstall a program as shown below.
   
4. You should now be able to see a list of applications installed on your computer. Locate Spotify in that list and right-click on it.
5. Select Uninstall from the context menu and follow the on-screen procedure to complete the process.
   

   

Once you have uninstalled Spotify, it is time you remove its data from the system by following the steps below:

1. Launch File Explorer and head over to This PC.
2. Now navigate to the location mentioned below.

   C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Spotify

3. In order to view the AppData folder, you may need to enable the option that lets you view hidden files and folders. Head over to the “View” tab on File Explorer’s menu and click on the “Hidden items” checkbox in the Show/hide section.
4. Now delete the contents in the Spotify folder. You can also delete the entire folder too.
5. Finally, download Spotify again and check if you can view the friend activity now.