Actually, I think FR has the best forum interface on the Net. For instance, try joining one of those million generic bulletin boards and pinging someone...
In his response, Patrick Ruffini also discusses FreeRepublic, making a strong case that FR can indeed be considered the conservative Kos although not quite: “[T]here is a conservative Daily Kos, that’s it’s Free Republic, but that it doesn’t really ‘count’ since it’s not a blog, and more critically, it won’t play nicely with the rest of the movement and it doesn’t worship candidates like Kos does.”
Ruffini is correct in saying that FR will never completely fulfill the same role for the right that Kos does on the left; he’s also correct that FreeRepublic is more independent-minded than Kos. This is mainly due to the fact that FreeRepublic is run as a noncommercial, non-partisan, conservative web site. That very much sets it apart from DailyKos and the rest of left-wing blogosphere which is hyperpartisan and highly commercialized.
FreeRepublic’s different nature has prompted many GOP politicians and PR staffers to write it off as not useful to the cause. This is a huge mistake. In my eight years of being on FreeRepublic, I can say that Freepers can very readily be persuaded to enlist in worthy conservative causes. Almost every day there are Freepers out and about protesting left-wing Democrats, demonstrating against nutjob protestors, and representing the right in online polls and forums. I’ve had them help me out with a number of projects.
Freepers are some of the most energetic and involved members of the political web. The key to understanding and working with them is to realize that they’re not Republican robots. In that way, they are very much representative of the GOP base as a whole. The main reason Freepers won’t work with GOP politicians is the same reason Republican voters haven’t turned out for them: the Republican party has not sufficiently worked with them. If GOPers want Freepers to turn out and help the cause, they need to stop kowtowing to the liberal elite media, explain their policies to the public better, and come to a strong conclusion as to what center-right means for the Web 2.0 world. Once that’s done, the Freepers and the conservative base will turn out in droves.
Yup, FR has some features no other boards have, the ability to link posts together by post number and ping specific people.
That said, I still wish FR had a true HTML editor. I hate having to type in all the formatting codes all the time.