I'm pretty sure the private data model is going to be clearly defined by EOY, between the community group work and bluesky internal work. We also made sure that bookmarks will migrate cleanly to protocol private data when it lands, so no need for the tinfoil hat. Your other explanation is pretty close to the mark.

EDIT: also fwiw, I got my start in 2012 working on ssb and then in 2013 on dat, both of which were conceptualized as bittorrent variants. Atproto has a pretty clear lineage from that p2p work. You just can't do large scale social computing on user devices.

yes, and we are using computers in our pockets now that are way more powerful than the ones we had when we were working on ssb. local indexes are possible, you and dom showed that back then.

ssb had private bookmarks, let's dig into how those were enabled