We were aiming to learn about how much work and cost this involved, how many people we’d reach, what levels of engagement we would get and to explore the risks and benefits of the federated model.

The trial so far has been really effective in helping us learn about how the Fediverse is evolving, what technical support a Mastodon server needs, what the costs are, and how a large media organisation like the BBC can engage with the many different overlapping communities that exist in this rapidly changing space.

We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub, the underlying protocol of Mastodon and the Fediverse.

Reassuringly, most of the comments and feedback have been positive, welcoming both our interest and the way we have set things up.We’ve had really encouraging levels of engagement(i.e. replies, re-posts and likes) on Mastodon.

Because this an experiment and a trial, it's not always the main priority for all the teams involved, so we may not be able to engage and reply as much as the Mastodon community and culture expect, and we recognise this could be an issue going forward.

Because of the potential sensitivity around news stories, we need to be particularly careful with our editorial processes and within the scope of this trial we are not in a position to guarantee time and effort from other teams outside of R&D.

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