Feature Request: Private Bookmarks for Repositories, Gists and Topics

[divyanshudhruv]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Lists

Body

I'd love to see an option to privately bookmark repositories and gists on GitHub without broadcasting that activity to followers.

Currently, starring a repository can appear in your followers' activity feeds. But not every star is an endorsement. Sometimes you just want to save something for later, keep track of useful projects, or bookmark your own repositories and gists without announcing it to everyone.

Proposed idea

Introduce a Private Bookmark feature that would let users:

• Save repositories and gists privately without generating activity in followers' feeds.
• Keep private bookmarks separate from their publicly starred repositories.
• View and manage their private bookmarks from a dedicated list.
• Bookmark and unbookmark items independently of the existing star functionality.

Example UI

The bookmark button could have two states:

Not bookmarked	Bookmarked

For example, I might want to bookmark repositories I'm currently working on, save interesting projects to explore later, or keep track of my own repositories and gists without having every star show up in my followers' feeds.

The existing public starring behavior can remain unchanged. This would simply give users a separate, private way to save and organize repositories and gists without publicly broadcasting their activity.

I think this would make GitHub much more useful as a personal bookmarking and organization tool.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[Nishant-Af]

Great idea! A workaround that works today for saving repos without starring (so nothing appears in followers’ feeds):

1. Private “bookmarks” repo
   Create a private repo (e.g. my-bookmarks) and keep a README.md with links, or open one issue per saved repo and use labels like to-explore, reference, mine. You get search, tags, and sorting for free.

2. Secret gist
   For a lightweight list, create a secret gist with a markdown file of links. It’s quick to edit from anywhere.

3. Auto-bookmark via the CLI
   With the GitHub CLI you can script it, for example by appending a repo URL to a file in your private repo with gh, so saving takes one command.

4. Watching
   Setting a repo to “Custom” watch (e.g. releases only) keeps it on your radar without a star, though it’s about notifications, not saving.

The only built-in option for organizing is star Lists, but those require starring the repo first, so the public star remains. That’s the gap this request would close.