This was prompted by thinking about how muting feels like quite a big step to me on a Discourse forum. On the forum I admin, I have some things that will be muted forever. Adding other topics or categories to my mute list, even if I mean it to only be for the short term, carries a risk that I’ll forget about them and never unmute them.
Other services (Twitter, Discord, etc) allow the user to set an expiration date when muting. On Twitter I have the option to mute a word for 1, 7 or 30 days. On Discord I can mute a channel or thread for periods ranging from 15 minutes to 24 hours. Both have the “until I manually unmute” option too, of course.
The most obvious use case for this is when there is something like a big event, a new novel release, the season finale of a tv show, etc., and I want to avoid discussion until I’m caught up. But there are plenty of cases where I don’t want to mute a category / ignore a user / mute a topic long-term, I just don’t want to engage with them right now.