There's someone who muted me IRL because I was a terrible addict ruining my life and theirs. It's been a frustrating experience and it took way too long for me to accept the situation but honestly it's what I needed. I'm more thankful than anything else but they'll probably never know because I have no way of telling them.

Another person muted me IRL because they felt like they should be a hopeless addict ruining their own life and my attempts to stop them were frustrating. They felt I was being presumptuous and controlling and yeah that's true but the alternative was just watching them deliberately dismantle every good thing they had. I have no idea where they are or what's happened to them and I'm kind of afraid to find out, so it's sort of mutual.

Everyone else I've stopped talking to isn't worth talking about.

Edit: maybe that's not true. I guess only selfishly care about those two instances because I lost something I wanted to keep. Notice they're about me being muted in a situation I found particularly stressful. Other instances that I've dismissed are more analogous to the situation you want to investigate.

Other people I've stopped talking to have been more like acquaintances that held contemptuous ideas, failed to be interesting, outright hated me, or just fell victim to the constraints of time, effort, and social anxiety. The latter probably don't really fit into the "muted" category and the first three generally have a lot of overlap.

In most cases those have been easier and less problematic than hubski mutes because they generally don't want to talk to me either. Hubski, by design, attracts people that want to talk about things so when I reject exactly that interaction it causes more friction.