8.3. Following Users and Organizations
GitHub's social layer is lightweight, but it's still part of how people stay aware of relevant work without actively searching for it.
💡 First Principle: Following a user or organization subscribes you to a lightweight activity signal — their public activity surfaces in your feed — without granting any access or notification-level detail the way watching a specific repository does (4.3). It's a discovery mechanism, not a permission or a notification subscription: following someone tells you that they did something publicly, not the same granular alerts a watched repository produces.
⚠️ Exam Trap: Following a user or organization is not the same as watching a repository. Following surfaces general public activity in your feed; watching (4.3) generates specific notifications for a particular repository's issues, pull requests, and discussions.
Reflection Question: You follow a well-known open-source maintainer to keep an eye on their public work. Does that alone notify you every time they comment on an issue, the way watching one of their repositories would?
