For sandboxing and historical preservation, it helps that interactive fiction is text-based, single-player, and non-networked. I wonder if they've added any way to connect to a server?
There was a mud based implementation of Inform 7 based multi player IF platform called Guncho, but it’s not maintained. It was an interesting experiment.
assuming you're talking about z-machines, the only functioning way i've seen to get data out is to use savefiles. there is an editor written in inform that does this. otherwise the interpreter has to be modified, see multizork for example.