What exactly is Misskey supposed to be?
Chozo@kbin.social to 
Most of the other Fediverse platforms are pretty obvious to me as to what they're meant to be alternatives to. Mastodon for Twitter/Threads, PixelFed for Instagram, Lemmy for Reddit, Matrix for Discord/Slack... But I can't quite place MissKey. It doesn't really feel like any other social network I've seen before.
I've tried looking around, but most of the instances I've seen are either in Japanese or Russian so I can't really tell what I'm looking at, or have no active users to really see what the engagement is supposed to be like.
Can anyone fill me in on what MissKey is meant to be an analog to or how it's meant to be used?
No Fediverse software is obliged to be an alternative to an already existing proprietary platform. Misskey is just another microblogging platform.
If I were to asked to imagine a microblogging (i.e. Twitter/Masto) service set in 22nd century cyber-punk Japan, MissKey is what I would imagine.
Misskey is microblogging รก la birdsite, largely Japanese. Calckey has English and Hebrew alternatives as well as others. It plays nice with Mastodon but it's more fully featured. I personally use sloth.run and I'd suggest giving it a go, the emoji are super cute
Misskey has been around since 2014, itโs not meant to be an alternative to anything. It wasnโt even part of the fediverse at first, iirc.
Anyway the best (imo) English fork is Calckey, and itโs basically Mastodon on steroids. I honestly donโt know why people choose mastodon over it, it does everything Mastodon does + more.