I certainly support local first, but if it is trivial to enable sharing of map favorites and POIs on open social rails, your risk is limited to "personal to you" locations being shared. JSON or Sqlite is fine for local storage of course. It is after all most likely simply a list of POI UUIDs/GUIDs identifiers and/or latitude/longitude coordinates with attribute fields. Foursquare and other social geo checkins long predate this, but I would agree good opsec should be the default, while still enabling open sharing with your data prevented from being captured and held hostage by Big Tech, imho.
I have many custom Google Maps lists I would love to share publicly on AT Protocol (mostly from collecting places in locations I've traveled to others would want to visit), for example, but would want some labels of places to remain private (homes of friends).
Export Google Maps List to CSV, KML and GPX - https://www.takeout-tools.com/blog/export-google-maps-list-c...
How to Turn Any List Into Google My Maps - https://www.lekoarts.de/how-to-turn-any-list-into-google-my-...
Google Maps Create a list of places - https://support.google.com/maps/answer/7280933
Example list:
Title,Address,Notes,Latitude,Longitude
"Golden Gate Bridge","San Francisco, CA","",37.8199,-122.4783
"Fisherman's Wharf","San Francisco, CA","Best chowder",37.8080,-122.4177
Yeah, there are all kinds of interesting things that can be done with shared data like this. But the first step is to have some standard ContentProvider to let apps share the data locally on a single device, similar to how other user data is handled. Because I'm tired of having several map apps installed for various reasons that all have separate favorites.
Once that is in place, people can create apps that build on it in lots of different ways.