Sure. It obviously always boils down to the people. Technology is merely supportive to that. But protocols can be improved so they offer better support. I really liked how you described moderation in posts above, quite appealing. And it can be combined with community concepts I outlined. If feel that - however they are implemented - a better support of community concepts online is crucial for social networking to improve and evolve.
When you say that ‘we are just sending messages back and forth’… when you mean that in a technical sense, it is true, but also trivialising the challenge we have in a heterogenous decentralized network. If you mean in a micro/macro-blogging context, then its true as well, but covers only a tiny sliver of the use cases and potential of the protocol. Maybe its a pipedream of mine, but I would love to see app silo’s disappear as more task-oriented services arise.
(Have to say I am not too optimistic on the progress here, atm 
)
Update: For the federated software I have in mind I’d need to model something of a Governance domain on top of Community, which goes slightly beyond moderation, but it may be defined such that you can define your moderation policies with it. Don’t know really how it would look like though.