Micro-Fame in the Age of Distributed Social Media
Micro-fame isn’t a glitch in the system—it’s the new architecture of online visibility. In a world where attention no longer flows from a few massive broadcasters but from thousands of overlapping micro-publics, visibility has become hyper-local, intensely personal, and often startlingly fragile. A creator can be virtually unknown to the wider world yet unmistakably famous within a TikTok niche, a Discord server, a subreddit, or a Mastodon instance. These small arenas generate their own constellations of recognition: bright clusters of followers who see you, engage with you, and sometimes scrutinize you with an intimacy the old mass-media spotlight never produced. Micro-fame is a smaller light, but it burns closer to the skin—and its consequences can be just as real.
