Following Players and Adding Friends

Music League has two ways to keep track of other players: following and friending. They look similar at first glance, but they work differently and they exist for different reasons.

The short version

• Follow is one-way. You can follow anyone, and you don't need their permission. They get a notification that you followed them. Use Follow the way you'd use following on other social media platforms — to keep tabs on someone you find interesting.
• Friend is two-way. One player sends a request; the other accepts or declines. Once accepted, both players show up as friends on each other's profiles. Use it to mark a real, mutual connection — usually someone you actually know.

You can do both at the same time. Following a friend, or being friends with someone who also follows you, is totally fine.

How to follow someone

1. Open the player's profile (tap their name or avatar anywhere in the app).
2. Tap Follow.

That's it. The other player gets a notification: "[Your name] followed you." They don't have an option to accept or deny anything (but anyone in Music League can block anyone else — see below — and you can remove followers). Your Follow shows up immediately on their Followers list, and they appear on your Following list.

To unfollow, open the same profile and tap Unfollow.

How to send a friend request

1. Open the player's profile.
2. Tap Add Friend.

They get a notification: "[Your name] sent you a friend request." The request sits in a pending state until they decide.

Until they accept, the button on your end changes to Cancel Request — you can take the request back anytime if you change your mind.

You can also find people without opening a profile first: open Social — from the main nav, or the Find your friends card on your dashboard — and search for a player by name. Search matches on display name only, and it won't show players who've turned off appearing in search (see below).

The Social page also shows a Suggested list. It won't include anyone who turned off appearing in search. It will show you the people you're most likely to know but aren't connected with yet, drawn from a mix of signals: people you share an active league with, former leaguemates from leagues that have finished, friends of your friends, and people you follow or who follow you. The stronger the connection, the higher up the list they appear — a current leaguemate ranks above someone you merely follow.

If you're brand new and have none of those connections yet, we'll still suggest a few other players to get you started, so the list is never empty when there are other players to show. Each time you open or refresh the page the list is reshuffled, so check back to see a different set.

Alongside those, Social is where you see what everyone has been up to — an activity feed from the people you follow — plus your full Following and Followers lists. Nearly anything you find in Music League can be shared on your other social networks — and vice versa!

What if I'm the one who got the friend request?

When you open the profile of a player who has sent you a friend request, the Accept button is the most prominent one, with Decline sitting next to it.

• Accept — you're now friends. Both of you get added to each other's friends list and you both get a confirmation notification.
• Decline — the request is removed. The other player is not notified that you declined, so there's no awkwardness if you don't want to accept.

You don't have to open each profile one at a time, though. Whenever you have incoming requests, a Friend requests section appears at the top of your own Friends page listing everyone who's asked to friend you, each with Accept and Decline right on the row. Handling a request updates the list on the spot, and once you've cleared them all the section disappears — so an empty Friends page never shows.

Ending a friendship

Either side can end an accepted friendship at any time. Open the profile, tap Unfriend, confirm. The other player is not notified.

If you want to send a fresh friend request later, you can — unfriending doesn't block anything.

How to block someone

If another player is bothering you, you can block them yourself — you don't need a League Admin to do it for you. There are two places to start a block:

From the player's profile:

1. Open the player's profile.
2. Tap the ⋯ (more options) button next to the Follow / Add Friend buttons to open the overflow menu, then tap Block player and confirm.

From a league's Members list:

1. Open a league you share with that player and go to its Members tab.
2. Find their row and tap Block at the end of it, then confirm.

Either entry point does exactly the same thing. The Block control on the Members list is your own personal privacy tool, not a League Admin action — every member sees it beside every other member (but never beside their own name). It is separate from the League Admin's Kick and Ban controls.

Blocking is reciprocal and social-only:

• Both directions. Once you block someone, you each stop seeing the other's comments, chat messages, and profile. It doesn't matter who did the blocking — the effect is the same for both of you.
• Comments and chat disappear. Where their comment or chat message used to be, you'll see a neutral [hidden] placeholder. They see the same for yours.
• Follows and friendships are removed. Blocking removes any follow or friendship between you, in both directions, and stops either of you from starting a new one until the block is lifted.
• No notifications cross the block. An @-mention between the two of you produces no notification.
• Gameplay is untouched. Scores, votes, standings, and playlists are exactly the same for everyone. Blocking someone never changes the competition — for you, for them, or for anyone else in the league.
• It's quiet. The other player is never proactively told you blocked them. The only time they can find out is if they try to @mention you — in a comment or in chat — where they'll see a short note that you've blocked them and that you won't see each other's comments, chat, or profile. Nothing else reveals the block, and you're never told when they attempt it.

To lift a block, tap Unblock — from the same two places, whichever is handier: the player's profile (their profile shows an Unblock button while they're blocked), or their row in a league's Members list. Their comments, chat, and profile become visible to both of you again immediately. Unblocking does not restore the follow or friendship you had before — if you want those back, you'll need to re-follow or re-add them.

Blocking a League Admin is allowed, and it's independent of moderation: it hides that person's comments, chat, and profile from you, but it doesn't remove them as League Admin or change what they can do in the league.

If someone is harassing you, you can also report their specific messages and comments (see Reporting Chat Messages and Comments) so a League Admin can review them. If the League Admin is the problem, report them from their profile page or email support@musicleague.com.

The Social page

The Social page is your own home for managing who you follow and who follows you. It has four tabs, each one a section you can expand or collapse, in this order:

• Activity — recent public activity from the people you follow. It shows the five most recent items, with See more to reveal more in place.
• Following — everyone you follow, with Unfollow and Block on each row.
• Followers — everyone who follows you, with Remove (drops them as a follower) and Block on each row.
• Suggestions — up to five people you're most likely to want to follow, drawn from shared leagues and other signals. Each row has Follow and Block. When you and a suggested player share leagues, the row notes how many you have in common. Following someone here moves them straight into your Following box, right away, without reloading the page.

Each box shows the first five rows with a See more link to reveal the rest in place. The Following and Followers boxes also have a Sort control (By date added or Alphabetically) that switches the box to the full, paged list.

The Activity and Suggestions boxes each have a Show filter — Following, Followers, People I've played with, or All — that changes whose activity, or which people, the box draws from. All reaches across every Music League player who allows their activity to appear (you control this for yourself with the Activity feed toggle in Settings → Visibility).

At the top of the page, Search by name finds any player to follow.

Friends are managed separately on your Friends page (unchanged) — the Social page is about follows.

Where do followers, following, and friends live?

On every profile page, there's a stats row near the top showing:

• Leagues — how many leagues this player is in
• Songs — how many songs they've submitted across all leagues
• Followers — how many people follow them (tap to see the list)
• Following — how many people they follow (tap to see the list)
• Friends — how many accepted friends they have (tap to see the list)

Each list is its own page. Tapping a list shows you the avatars and names of every player in that relationship.

Is my followers / following / friends list private?

You control this. In Visibility (Settings → Visibility), your Followers, Following, and Friends counts each have their own on/off toggle in the Profile section. Turn one off to keep it to yourself; leave it on to let anyone who opens your profile see it.

Separately, the Appear in Find Friends search toggle on the same page controls whether other players can turn you up when they search for people by name. Turn it off and you won't show up in anyone's people-search results or in the Suggested players list on their Find Players page (and so they can't follow you or send you a friend request from either place); turning it off does not change your existing friendships or hide your profile from someone who already has your link.

What do followers actually get?

A notification when you follow them, a count on their profile, and a public list where they can see you among their followers. Your followers also see anything you post to your Activity feed (see below), subject to your Activity feed visibility setting. You in turn see recent public activity from everyone you follow in the Activity box at the top of your Social page. Your own profile's Activity section is different: it shows only your own posts and activity, not anyone else's.

Posting to your Activity feed

Your own profile has an Activity tab with a composer at the top. You can post three kinds of update, and each one shows up on your profile and in the feeds of your friends and the people who follow you (subject to your Activity feed visibility setting in Settings → Visibility):

• Text — a plain written update.
• Link — a URL, shown as a preview card that links out
• Photo — one or more images from your device.

Below the composer is your profile's Activity section: only your own posts and recent activity, newest first. When it gets long, a View all link opens the full list. What the people you follow have been up to lives in the Activity box on your Social page.

Comments and replies. Every post can be commented on, and you can reply to a comment to start a thread. You can delete your own comments; the person who made a post can also remove comments on it.

One-click sharing. Music League content you can already see carries a Share to Activity button, and sharing posts a rich card to your Activity feed that links back to the original. You can share:

• A song submission: once the round's results are revealed, and only from a public league you play in.
• A league: public leagues you play in only. Private leagues and drafts cannot be shared, so the option does not appear for them.
• A Spotify round playlist: once results are revealed, from a public league you play in.

A share follows its source. If the original is deleted, or a shared league is made private, the share disappears from feeds.

Deleting one of your own posts removes it (and its comments) from every feed.

What do friends actually get?

For now: same as followers — a notification on request, a notification on acceptance, a count on the profile, and a public list. Friend-only profile views, friend-only DMs, and friend-driven league invitations are all on the roadmap. The friendship relationship itself is in place so those features can build on it as they ship.

What can't I do yet?

A few things are explicitly out of scope for the current release. We're not pretending they exist, so you don't have to look for them:

• Mute another player (a quieter, one-way version of blocking). For now, blocking is the tool for cutting off contact.
• DM a friend. Coming later — for now, chat lives inside leagues, not between individual players.

Can I follow or friend a soft-deleted or banned player?

A player who deleted their account no longer has a profile to visit, so you can't initiate a new follow or friend request on them. If you were already following them or friends with them before they left, the relationship record stays in the database but they won't get notifications, they won't appear in lists and their profile page will be deleted.

A player banned from a specific league can still be followed or friended outside of that league — banning is league-scoped, not account-wide.

Side-by-side comparison

Related

• Reporting Chat Messages and Comments
• League Notifications