I recommend you using redis . When one user have more and more friends, your mysql table will be very very big. In that case if you query friends information from mysql, it is not a good idea. You query will be very slow.

In this case, you'd better using some Cache Tools to improve your application, such as Memcache Redis ..

But I need to find a way to grap the status updates from my friends. I will work on the rest later.

I tried this but is not working

public function getStatusUpdatesFromFriends() {
	$user = \Auth::user();

	$friend_list    = $user->friends()->lists('id');
	$revFriends_list = $user->revFriends()->lists('id');

	$friends = array_unique(array_merge($friend_list, $revFriends_list));

	$friends[]  = $user->id; // To show my own updates
	// dd($friends);

	$statuses = $this->model->with(array('users' => function($query) use($friends) {
		$query->whereIn('user_id', $friends);
	}))->get();

	dd($statuses);
}