In v8.0, PhotoDemon's automatic update interface received a number of improvements. These improvements were primarily focused delivering faster, smaller, more secure updates to end-users, with a happy side-effect of being a better GitHub citizen (by requiring fewer resources to deliver our updates).
This new update system is built off GitHub Pages, which has several advantages over serving update data from a raw GitHub repository. (Benefits include better CDN coverage and much more generous bandwidth limits.) PD already does a lot to minimize update notifications, but nightly builds are a little more cumbersome, owing to the frequency with which they change.
The current update process serves stable and beta updates as complete units, with all 3rd-party libraries bundled with the download. Nightly builds do not do this; instead, they allow users to download just the updated PhotoDemon.exe file (which is actually just a small portion of the overall download size).
Additional ideas for improvements are always welcome!