Nice question.  I can definitively say there is no planned function similar to Swarm in Podman right now.  I'll expand some thoughts below.

I would venture to say that the general thinking here is if you need orchestration, then the best approach is K8s.  Yes, I realize it is not the perfect solution all the time and there is a learning curve.  This is why Podman has the `kube` functionality.  It actually somewhat solves both; you can snapshot a running Pod or container and generate a K8s YAML file.  That helps with the learning curve.  But you can also `replay` that YAML with Podman (sort of like compose) or shoot it into your K8s implementation.

Also, I think in general the container community has settled on K8s as a "standard" regardless of which implementation or flavor you use.  We like that as Podman.

Anyways, that is my thoughts here.  Podman is generally single node, multiple nodes maybe when using our remote capability.  And when anyone says orchestration and uses words like swarm in their documentation like "load balancing" and "cluster"; to me, you are talking about K8s.

I hope I have answered your question and provided some insight into our project's thinking.

Brent