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In the beginning of the story, after Vashti talks to her son, she responds to a backlog of incoming messages from friends. This is an unusual condition, caused by her being in a private chat with her son, and the flood does not continue after she answers them all. That implies, at least to me, some form of storage system that's holding the messages until she responds. So we have some kind of server there on at least a primitive level. Forster didn't go into the nuts and bolts of his Machine (remember, this was written only a few years after the invention of the triode vacuum tube) but it seems clear to me that some of its functions would require something like a server, and in all probability it has many other features which do not appear in the story.
What Forster nailed so squarely, though, at least in my mind, was aspects of online culture: the echo chamber effect, the decline of interest in personal experience compared to vicarious experience, the shortened attention span (the 10-minute lecture, for instance) and the emphasis on a wide, shallow group of online friends rather than a narrow, deep group of offline friends.
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