A null there indicates a deserialisation error and therefore due to the
catch block immediately succeeding the changed line everything will
continue to work as intended.
These can occur when a network connection is completely unavailable (ie.
host resolution failures are occurring). Currently these would appear as
important errors which spammed the notification overlay every retry
forever, while no network connection is available.
I also took this opportunity to remove a lot of `bool` passing which was
no longer in use (previously the fail count / retry process was
different to what we have today).