Nearly all apps with linking capabilities have a way to show backlinks but other than Roam and maybe Workflowy possibility (?) I am not aware of any that show outbound links as obs does. I read a comment somewhere that outgoing links are largely unnecessary since most people want to follow support for a specific note not go forward down a potential rabbit hole. Perhaps that applies to ZK linking but non-Zk referencing for research and writing referencing I can see outbound being of more value. But that raises the question; why do most apps only carry the backlinks and not the outbound links? I believe Zim, Vscode, Dendron, Zettlr to name a few all lack outbound links and even Onenote has an addon to create a list of backlinks for each page but no outbound. Does anyone here find outbound links terribly useful? Would your world cease to exist if you were forced to go back to a world of backlinks only?
I don’t use the outbound links view too often, but I do like the outbound “unlinked mentions”. It shows what pages that are mentioned, but not linked to, from this page. It’s a convenient tool when reviewing a page to see if there are places it should be linked to.
I think that was part of the argument against them linking to any page with a shared word or phrase may not be necessary and complicate the train of thought process. At least in the zk context.
Agreed – and that’s what I like about the view. It doesn’t clutter the page text with automatic links, but rather reveals potential links in the sidebar and lets me decide whether I want to promote them to real links.
The Unlinked Mentions section of the Backlinks panel is useless because it fills up with garbage suggestions. My daily notes have, unsurprisingly, “2021” in their names. So the unlinked mentions panel suggests linking the note to every file in the vault that has “2021” in the name, and the panel suggests linking to every note that a URL containing “2021” within that note’s text.
That’s a clever way to use the outbound Unlinked mentions. I’ll have to try it.
Agreed with this issue. I think there is a outbound links upgrade in the works to give it the toolbar setting that backlinks has such as collapse, expand, search. I think adding a Filter setting to exclude certain terms will make the unlinked mentions more usable.
As an author, who uses obsidian for more than just “personal knowledge management of notes in my own words,” I’d be pretty annoyed to lose outbound links, which is an excellent way for me to get an overview of what I’ve referenced in a long document.
I come to Obsidian from worldbuilding wikis like LegendKeeper, not “pure knowledge” PKM apps. LegendKeeper has a similar feature that I sorely missed (I’m one of the people who advocated strongly for outlinks), and it’s very useful for making sure that I’ve included all of the characters and locations that wound up in the prose part of my story in the metadata and interlinks.
I use outlinks as often as I use backlinks, but I use them for different things.