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They will if they subscribed to your repo's new releases (with GitHub's "watch" function)

The problem is that this subscribes them to everything.

I used to use watch but I could care less about every individual commit on anything other than projects I'm actively working on.

Watch is not a good substitute for a way to learn about important changes on an infrequent, regular basis (i.e. once a month emails).

Try clicking the watch button now. It changed a while ago, and you can narrow it down to certain events (releases, commits, issues, PRs, etc.)

Gotcha that's a good improvement. But this still only works by showing a visual change in your feed at the time of the release. What if I care about software but don't spend all day on Github's logged in homepage/activity feed?

Email is the only reliable way to send/receive important updates for any meaningful project.

You get an email if you subscribe to releases.

Huh, I see releases in the Github UI and I never get release emails. Maybe I have an email filter I forgot about.

You need to change your notification settings in GitHub. Maybe sending you a email of new notifications is not the default option.

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