To your second answer, yes and yes. I write in the post:

> As for how we will make money, most users, even technical ones who could self-host, don’t want to self-host (but they value that optionality and insurance against lock-in). They want a subscription SaaS, which will make features like backups, integrations, and collaboration much easier.

Would it be possible to deploy a web-based instance with the server handling storage and collaboration? If so, I might try my hand at packaging it for Sandstorm once that's available. Would make self-hosting Athens super easy for Sandstorm users.

Their page https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works writes:

> For example, when using Etherpad – a document editor app – on Sandstorm, every document lives in a separate container, isolated from the others. The front-end and database for that document live in the container. The container has a private filesystem for storage. JavaScript running in the user’s browser can talk only to the document container for which it was loaded, no others. All of this makes up a single “grain”.

Right now Athens works directly with the filesystem (and therefore filesync services), not a REST-ful/HTTP server. I'm not sure how Sandstorm apps "talk to the document container." If they allow read/write access to the filesystem from the web app, it could work, but I'm not sure how Sandstorm works.

I guess I was assuming that real-time collaboration would eventually involve some sort of synchronization server as a rendezvous point, in which case that would be the natural thing to run on the server side in Sandstorm. That may not be the route you're taking though!