Always cool to see mainstream orgs get involved with the Fediverse and their explainer is good, but there is no way to ascertain what they will consider a successful experiment at the end of the six months. It leads me to believe there is a good chance the whole thing will be scrapped in a few months, which makes me less inclined to engage with it (which in turn increases the likelihood that it will be considered a failure, etc).

I suppose it's better than silently subjecting it to a six-month probation period, but I can't imagine it is so expensive to maintain (and use as a mirror for their Twitter etc) that they need the probation period at all. And if in six months the BBC publicly pronounce that they don't see the value in Mastodon it will probably be a net negative for the Fediverse.