GitHub has been a part of the modern developer's toolkit for a long time -- it was launched as a private beta in January 2008 and steadily grew in use. After being bought by Microsoft in 2018 it further cemented its relevancy by changing its pricing model to allow any user to create unlimited private repositories. There have been other hosted code repositories (I have some fond memories of Google Code!), but none has captured the same mind-share as GitHub. There are 73 million developers registered and more than 200 million repositories (including at least 28 million public repositories) created at GitHub.
Since the sheer number of new repositories being created can be a little overwhelming GitHub provides a few tools to discover new, interesting code. GitHub has a few features that somewhat mimic other social networks, but it feels like they restrain themselves from going "full Facebook" with engagement at any cost. The GitHub social mechanisms feel mostly useful and somewhat tucked away unless you go looking for them. There _is_ an activity feed when you are logged in and go to the homepage which gets populated in a few different ways.
To follow an account, click the Follow button on their homepage. All of their public actions will then show up on your activity feed. It's the perfect way to see what other developers find interesting and their creations. Every coding language has users that contribute significantly to the community and they are most likely on GitHub. Following one developer who has created something you find interesting can lead you to other projects.
Watching a repository will send you notifications of actions in a specific repository. This can range from only being notified when someone specifically uses your account name in an issue or pull request, or all of the actions that can happen in a repository, to somewhere in the middle. The custom notifications can be tied to issues, pull requests, releases, discussions, and security alerts.
Staring a GitHub repository provides a way to save specific repositories to a list to keep an eye on them, but without getting alerted to all of their events. Since the time investment is small and the mechanism is frictionless, stars provide a feedback mechanism for developers -- how many people are interested in a repository enough that they do not want to forget about it. It provides a way to bookmark code repositories quickly and easily.
With the growth of GitHub over the years and the amount of code repositories it can become hard to organize all your stars. GitHub provides a list of your stars and ways to search through them, but once you have a decent amount, re-finding some code again can be challenging, especially if the name is not particularly intuitive.
Late in 2021, GitHub added lists as a public beta. A list provides a way to organize stars a little more. Instead of one giant list of all of your stars, now they can be arranged into folders. Since stars are publicly-available your lists are as well.
Yes, you need to be logged in to star a repository in GitHub.
You can watch a code repository to get notified of changes in a code repository in GitHub.
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