When you fork a repository on Github, the website retains the association between the original and forked repos. But there are also artificial limitations e.g.

When you fork a repository on Github, the website retains the association between the original and forked repos. But there are also artificial limitations e.g. Github forks can't be private when there's no technical reason that couldn't be the case. A forked repo is fundamentally just a clone with a different origin (i.e. changes get committed to a new place). What we think of as "forking" is the user experience that services like Github provide. If you clone a repository and then make a new project on Github with it, Github has no way of identifying that what you've done is technically a fork. It could obviously, but it doesn't. Templating is basically the same thing, but it's more like clone a repository, delete the .git folder, run git init, and then associate the repo with your account. Except this all happens transparently on Github's servers and what you end up with is a clean new project with an "initial commit". So in a sense whether you fork or template, you're still cloning a repo, but what happens after you clone is different in each case (and is also different from "just" cloning).