For anyone else reading this who went: "Nice -- where is this experimental software @darius has been building?" One big one is Hometown, a wonderful and thoughtful Mastodon fork, but the others are listed here: http://tinysubversions.com/projects/

@darius @stpaultim @roadriverrail Regarding #search, an implementation I would LOVE to see (and ASAP, to redirect energy from other possibilities) is #optIn full-text indexing of public (and unlisted) posts via a bot that follows back anyone who follows it (which I first saw suggested in https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/autodetecting-and-outing-mastodon-scrapers-with-scrapersnitchbot.html#but_its_public ). I don't want to implement it myself, but I'd use it, and I've been telling everyone I can think of about it, in the hopes that someone else will.