Hello anytypers! Let me preface this by saying that I believe that Anytype has the potential to be the best PKM software that exists. I am currently not using it as my single PKM tool because of what I’ll present here (also: this was entirely drafted in anytype and copy pasted into here. Anytype is the only software that can do this competently)
In Anytype backlinks are a useful feature, but in my opinion it still needs some improvements to be entirely useful.
I shared on another post about issues with the backlinks popup modal. Automatic Bi-directional linking + Rollups
The backlinks will only display the page which is linking to it. And it will include the description, not the Type. This means that I won’t necessarily know which page it is linking from. We could have a Note and a Task linking to it, and we wouldn’t be able to distinguish them just from their names which could be the same.
My first suggestion is just to include the type in this modal here, like this:
Backlinks page
Now you might have noticed a sneaky little ‘expand’ button in the previous screenshot. I’ll explain why I think that’s a good idea.
This backlinks function works great if you have 2, 3 or 4 backlinks to the same page. But there are times when you will have projects that are so large that you will have 100s of pages linking to it. And it becomes impossible to sift through them. So my suggestion is that this ‘expand’ button leads you to a new page, that will be something of the sorts:
This is taken out of a Notion page I have created that has multiple pages linking to it. In Notion these are relations that are bidirectional.
My thinking is that this expanded backlinks page could show all the backlinks grouped by type. Which would allow me to immediately identify things such as:
- Which people are involved in this project
- What tasks are associated to this project?
- What documents are associated with this project
- and so on
Hope this is helpful! Let me know what you think