Q: Why did Closedverse die when your computers were taken?
I used to host on the cloud for a long time, and I’ve used them all - AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, and more. Around the time Indigo came out, the activity dropped significantly, and as you can imagine the majority of the userbase stopped using the site.
Around this time I was also setting up a pretty nice home server, so I thought to self-host the site, which I have done on occasion, moving back and forth between home and cloud.
Closedverse was definitely self hosted from October 2018 to April 2019. Naturally, I didn’t keep backups, or at least, off-site backups. I made it a habit to manually back up by hand, though at this time I wanted my data storage to become independent, storing everything on the home server and nowhere else. That’s why when I lost it, I lost everything, and the site immediately went down.
I was able to hand over control of the domain to PF2M because there were other computers I could use, though.

Q: Why did they agree to let you have your machines back?
First of all, they kept them for as long as they did without destroying them, probably because not enough time had passed. According to the police report, in early 2020 the case had become inactive, and by late 2021 they were needed for the aforementioned school thing, and by early 2023 they were just finishing up with that and I was asking for them back. With that timeline, there really wasn’t enough time in between for them to justify throwing them away.
Now, before everything had become conclusive, I had talked to a lady on the phone who told me that most cases “of this nature” require the devices to be wiped before they can be returned and implied that my machines may have needed to be wiped.
However, another lady who I talked to later on, actually told me that they didn’t need that, that they “didn’t find anything”. I didn’t have to sign anything special to get them back either, just a confirmation that they were checked out.
From this, we can infer that they didn’t find anything illegal on my computers, or Closedverse.