Users can highlight text in richt text fields, and link that to another entity.
These inline references appear in the target entities in the references field (if enabled). The references are displayed as a title with the selected text.
This is a good suggestion. There have been many discussions on how references could be improved (e.g. here and here). I know when references/backlinks were implemented there was a lot of attention on Roam and all applications implemented some form of backlinks. However, very few actually seem to really embrace backlinks as Roam did as a source of (semantic) data and so in most cases the feature doesn’t add much value.
Being able to view more of the context surrounding the reference has been discussed extensively but there hasn’t been any changes. I think feed view provides an interesting approach. However, there has to be some form of control over how much of the context is shown (how many sentences / paragraphs / bullet points above/below are shown). Otherwise, it can become overwhelming and equally as useless. I think Roam’s approach of treating each text block as a distinct node, with hierarchical relationships between each individual block, made controlling this easy. I always thought Roam’s backlinks could benefit from a slider control that allowed you to control the “depth” of context shown for the backlink (either a permanent setting or a quick temporary “peak” option). However, I am not sure how that can be done in fibery.