15.1 Following Users and Organizations

Why GH-900 tests following

Domain 7 of GitHub Foundations (GH-900), Explore the GitHub community, is 5–10% of the exam. The January 2026 outline asks you to identify how to follow users and organizations to stay informed about activity. That bullet is not a social-media trivia item. It tests whether you can pick the GitHub control that keeps you oriented around people without granting access, flooding your notifications inbox, or copying a repository.

Following is how you subscribe to a person's or organization's public activity. It is not organization membership, not a repository role, and not a watch. Mix those up and you will fail scenarios that mention dashboards, stars, or notifications in the same sentence.

GitHub's discovery docs put following in a set of complementary tools: Explore for browsing popular work, search for a known topic, stars for saving repositories, and following for keeping up with the people and organizations behind projects. Domain 7 expects you to know which tool matches which intent.

Following people

When you follow a user, GitHub shows their public activity on your personal dashboard. That feed is the point of following. You do not get a notification for every commit they push. You do not gain access to their private repositories. You do not become a collaborator. You are saying "show me what this person does in public," not "add me to their team."

GitHub also uses following as a discovery signal. If someone you follow stars a public repository, GitHub may recommend that repository to you. Following therefore does two jobs: it keeps your dashboard focused on people whose work you care about, and it feeds recommendation surfaces that help you find related projects. Starring is still the action that bookmarks the repository; following is the action that says whose stars should influence what you see.

To follow a user:

1. Open the user's profile page.
2. Under the profile picture, click Follow.

To stop, return to the same page and click Unfollow. GitHub documents that you unfollow when you no longer want to see that person's public activity. To see who a user follows, click following under their avatar. To see who follows them, click followers. Those lists are a public social graph. They are not an access-control list, a billing roster, or a team membership page.

Following is one-way. The other person does not have to follow you back. They do not approve the follow. They cannot use your follow as a reason to push to your private repositories.

Following organizations

You can also follow organizations. GitHub currently documents this capability as a public preview that is subject to change, but the product behavior GH-900 cares about is stable enough to test: following an organization puts public organization activity on your personal dashboard. GitHub's examples include new discussions, sponsorships, and repositories.

The steps are similar to following a person, with the button in a different place:

1. Open the organization page you want to follow.
2. In the top-right corner, click Follow.

Click Unfollow in the same corner to stop. A user's following list can include both people and organizations, so the profile social graph is how you inspect what someone else is tracking.

Following an organization does not add you as a member, does not grant repository roles, does not open private issues, and does not install the organization's GitHub Apps on your account. If an exam item says "stay informed about public work from an org such as github or kubernetes," the answer is Follow. If the item says "triage private issues inside the company org," you need membership plus watch, participating, or assignment—not Follow.

Follow versus watch versus star versus fork

GH-900 loves this four-way contrast. All four controls live near the top of GitHub, and all four can look like "I care about this work." They do different things.

Watch is a repository notification setting. When you watch a repository you subscribe to updates for activity in that repository. GitHub documents a maximum of 10,000 watched repositories. The Watch dropdown on a repo also lets you choose Participating and @mentions, Ignore, or Custom events such as issues, pull requests, releases, security alerts, or discussions. Watch lives on the repository page, not on a user profile. Following a maintainer does not watch their repositories. Automatic watching of repositories you have push access to (except forks) is a notification default covered in Domain 3; Domain 7 only needs you to remember that watch equals notifications, not dashboard social activity.

Star is a bookmark plus a popularity signal. GitHub documents that starring makes it easy to find a repository or topic later, that you manage stars from your stars page, that starring can surface similar projects on your personal dashboard, and that many repository rankings depend on star counts. Explore GitHub shows popular repositories based on stars. You can also star topics. Lists for organizing stars are documented as a public preview. Starring does not subscribe you to issues. Domain 3 already used that trap; Domain 7 repeats it because discovery questions mix "save this" with "notify me" and "follow this person."

Fork is a new repository that starts as a copy of another repository—the upstream—and stays connected to it. You fork when you want to propose changes you cannot push directly, the classic fork-and-pull model. Forking is not how you follow a person, and it is not how you subscribe to notifications. Section 15.3 covers when to fork versus using a template.

Dashboard activity is not the notifications inbox

Your personal dashboard is a discovery surface. Following fills it with public events from people and organizations. Stars by people you follow can add repository recommendations. Explore and Trending add more browsing.

Your notifications inbox at github.com/notifications is a work queue. It fills when you watch a repository, participate in a conversation, get @mentioned, get assigned, or are asked to review. Those events can also arrive by email to a verified address and in GitHub Mobile. Following a user does not create that subscription. If an exam stem says "I do not want email for every issue, I just want to see what this person publishes," the control is Follow. If the stem says "alert me when a Dependabot alert or a new pull request lands in this repo," the control is Watch (or a Custom watch), not Follow.

Exam scenarios

A documentation writer wants to keep up with a well-known security researcher. She does not need commit notifications from every repository the researcher owns. She follows the user. Later, when that researcher stars a public secrets-scanning project, GitHub may recommend that repository on her dashboard. If she wants to return to it, she stars it. If she wants issue mail from it, she watches it. If she wants to send a fix, she forks it.

A developer likes the public roadmap of an open-source foundation. He is not an org member. He follows the organization so new public repositories, sponsorships, and discussions appear on his dashboard. He still cannot open private issues, change billing, or install apps for that org.

A teammate is drowning in mail because they have push access to many organization repositories and automatic watching is on. Following fewer people will not fix that. They need notification settings: Participating and @mentions, Custom watch events, or unwatch. Domain 7 will still offer Follow as a distractor because the word "follow" sounds like "keep up with the team."

Traps GH-900 will set

• Follow is not Watch. Follow is people and orgs; Watch is a repository. Following a maintainer does not subscribe you to their issues.
• Follow is not Star. Star bookmarks a repository or topic and feeds rankings. Follow bookmarks nothing and copies nothing.
• Follow is not Fork. Fork copies a repository and keeps an upstream link. You do not fork a user.
• Follow is not membership. Following octo-org does not make you a member, a billing manager, or a GitHub App installer for that org.
• Public only. Following shows public activity. Private commits, private issues, and internal repositories stay invisible unless you already have access through a different mechanism.
• Unfollow is enough. You do not need to block, unwatch, or unstar to stop dashboard activity from a person; Unfollow is the matching control.
• Preview wording. Organization following is documented as a public preview. The exam still tests the idea: public org activity on the dashboard, Follow in the org header.

If you remember only one sentence: Follow keeps people and orgs on your dashboard; Watch fills your inbox; Star saves a repo; Fork copies a repo.