Codeigniter remove follow button after following user

You're passing $data['friends'] to your view. But in the view, you immediately overwrite $friends with some session variable 'user_id2'. So, the friends from your model aren't recognized.

You are right there, but you see in the view when I use $friends['username']; it throws an error saying Message: Undefined variable: friends, even when friends is defined in the controller.