Presenting messages to participants based on neighborhoods

Participants of a group of participants in a chat may be associated with neighborhoods. A neighborhood associated with a participant includes a subset of the participants and represents the participants whose messages the associated participant can see in the chat. When a participant generates a message, the message is presented to an audience that includes each participant with the participant that generated the message in their associated neighborhood. As the message receives indications of approval (e.g., "likes"), the size of the audience is increased to include additional participants. Once the message receives a threshold number of indications of approval, the message may be displayed to all of the participants in the chat. The size of the neighborhoods may be dynamically adjusted based on the number of messages that are generated in each neighborhood to keep the number of messages that are presented within a predetermined range.