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I have a GitHub account and I follow some of my friends and other people whose projects interest me. When following someone, I was expecting to see their public activity in my news feed, but it is not the case. I am used to following someone on Twitter and I thought GitHub would work the same way.

How exactly does following people work on GitHub?

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3 Answers 3

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After contacting GitHub support about this, here is what they responded me with :

Just to clarify things, I did a bit more digging and found that if you follow a user you will receive the following notifications:

  • when they follow users
  • when they star repositories
  • when they fork or create a public repository

So it seems like you don't get notifications for every action they make. For that, you have to either:

  • Check their public activity on their profile, or
  • Watch a specific repo to get notifications for commits, etc.

While I understand that you would get tons of notifications if every action was displayed in the news feed, I'd like that we should at least have the control on which kind of notifications I want to see in my feed.

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Apart from this description seems there are not other documented behavior of the follow feature:

One of the great features on GitHub is the ability to see what other people are working on and who they are connecting with. When you follow someone, you will get notifications on your dashboard about their GitHub activity.

Try looking in the dashboard and see what updates you get from the people you follow.

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  • It seems there is no such thing called dashboard... Maybe you meant News feed? If so, I don't have anything in there from the people I follow. I can look at their public activity directly on their profile, but I would like to have it in my news feed.
    – marco-fiset
    Dec 5, 2012 at 14:28
  • @marco-fiset I provided a link in the above post, I think newsfeed actually is a part of the dashboard along with the rest, I see myself there are no updates from the people I recently follow but maybe this doesn't work retroactively for older updates like the RSS.
    – Eduard Florinescu
    Dec 5, 2012 at 14:32
  • I understand that it may not work retroactively, but I have seen people make some actions since I followed them and these actions I'm interested in (which is why I follow them in the first place) do not show on my dashboard. So sad that GitHub does not provide any documentation whatsoever.
    – marco-fiset
    Dec 5, 2012 at 14:48
  • @marco-fiset There is also the possibility that the feature is broken, in that case probably someone should contact GitHub and inform them about it.
    – Eduard Florinescu
    Dec 5, 2012 at 15:14
  • Your dashboard is located at github.com. Click on Github icon (black circle near the search field at the top) and you will open your Dashboard.
    – phts
    Nov 5, 2014 at 9:30
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From "About your personal dashboard":

You'll see updates in your news feed when a user you follow:

  • Stars a repository.
  • Follows another user.
  • Creates a public repository.
  • Opens an issue or pull request with "help wanted" or "good first issue" label on a repository you're watching.
  • Pushes commits to a repository you watch.
  • Forks a public repository.
  • Publishes a new release.
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