There is like a multitude of possible reasons.

Can you open it up, without destroying or damaging it?

If so, you would need a multimeter to trace, which components are broken and maybe you can repair them.

There is an Ansible repo. It does all you need. It’s just some configuration in one file. Maybe takes a few hours to read through, but it can set up early everything Matrix has to offer and is well documented… It just really is a lot.

It’s not that early, but eyezmaze.com (which apparently still exists) was one of those sites I found one day and regularly played on for years.

If you want to get a feeling of the old internet, look here: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

To be clear, those are not (only) old sites, but a lot of them feel like the old web.