Interesting... mastodon.online (often used for testing upcoming features) now has a new public web page, see the attached screenshot.
This is the view *without* being logged in, and shows the Explore tab by default, with options to see Local and Federated. Try it yourself at https://mastodon.online
There hasn't been a new Mastodon release since May, yet there are some important new features now active on mastodon.online but not yet released in the main version, including hashtag following, built-in translation etc. Post editing isn't available, but it's been part of the code for a whie now in a deactivated form.
It's unclear why there hasn't been a new release in such a long time as new features pile up waiting to go out. Are they planning to release lots of important features all at once in some kind of mega-release?