but you see, for "building in public" having the main branch be stable means you barely ever see any activity at the front of the repo page

i definitely aver towards the idea of making the main branch called "development" and it will always compile but it may not be stable and may crash at any moment, and near the top of the readme.md you explain that to build release versions go to the tags page, click releases, to find the actual stable versions
 

 if you go do a survey of many active projects on github you will see that some adhere to your idea of repo policy, while others even label their default, main branch as "development" and tag releases and in some cases the tags are associated with a github Release