Up until recently, the mute feature wasn’t finished. It was supposed to remove muted topics and topics in muted categories / by muted users from Latest, but it was never finished. However, after I brought it up on the Discourse Meta, Sam finished it. The change is now live on the Discourse meta and muted topics no longer show up in Latest.
Please update Discourse so we are able to mute certain threads, users, and categories. If it’s easier to just merge the fix than to update, the commit can be found here: