A voice channel (or “call” if you wanna equate them) with no people won’t use any “tons of bandwidth” though. There’s literally no data being transferred. A voice stream doesn’t even have to be allocated (or whatever the right terminology is for that).

EDIT: actually, you can just keep a call open indefinitely. I’m in a room that does this regularly. People hop in and out all the time.

That’s interesting, I’ve never experimented with that. Still, people want an obvious equivalent to Discord voice channels. Calls aren’t voice channels, no matter how much you want them to be the same. At a technical level they’re the same yes, but the UX is completely different.

Hell you could even say all they need to do to implement voice channels is at the client level because the server already kind of supports it through the Jitsi calls.