At this work retreat I was just on, they did these teambuilding exercises. A lot of them were the kind of thing that make me insane, but one of the actually helpful ones had us talking about aspects of our personality that we loved and aspects we would get rid of if we could. And at the top of the "get rid of" list, for me, was perfectionism, because I have found it to be practically crippling in my own life. There are so many things I haven't experienced because I let the fear of not doing it right stop me from trying. So I completely understand about perfectionism stopping people from getting more involved.

But of course, if you play it safe, you may learn a lot about the people you read, but they don't learn about you, so you miss out on actual friendships. (One thing that helped me a lot was to send people private email to talk about things when I was feeling too shy to post on lj).

But the feeling intimidated by other folks being smarter--sure, there will always be people who are better writers or better artists or better essayists or whatever, but you probably have more skills than you know, and you only develop them if you try! (And lots of the best writers in fandom posted really scarily bad stuff back in the day, so everybody has room for improvement).