Podman does have a socket that can be started. I use it on Linux so I'm not sure how that works on MacOS but it's API is Docker compatible, thus works with the docker cli and docker-compose as well.
IIRC the podman socket is a planned thing for macOS as it'll be necessary for certain features that rely on the docker socket and don't use SSH, such as VSCode's Remote Containers extension.
However you can create an SSH tunnel to create the socket locally to allow non-podman clients to utilize the socket over SSH with the DOCKER_HOST environment variable.
# Get URI
> podman system connection ls
# Create tunnel
> ssh -nNT -L/tmp/podman.sock:/run/user/1000/podman/podman.sock -i ~/.ssh/podman-machine-default ssh://core@localhost:[PORT]
# Export socket location
> export DOCKER_HOST='/tmp/podman.sock'
The podman socket can be used to connect stuff to podman.
For example, a GUI program or even docker-compose.
However I must admit that I'm having serious troubles with podman+docker-compose (rhel 8.4, podman 3.2.3) so I reverted to podman-compose (which is way lower in quality and completeness).
