Podman initially was daemon less, but docker-compose is a python script that interacts with dockerd directly through its rest API, not by invoking docker cli commands.

So even though podman offers a compatible cli interface, if was no help to get compose to work.

podman-compose is a re-implementation of the docker-compose spec in a podman compatible way. Like any re-implementation, compatibility issues are possible.

The main podman project instead chose to tackle such incompatibility by implementing an optional daemon mode offering a compatible to docker REST api.

If you start de podman service on a recent version, you can use docker-compose as-is. It will happily send commands to the podman daemon and from my few initial tests, everything works perfectly so far.